Search Results

Advanced Search

241 to 255 of 269 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Think outside the bun

Colin Burrow: Quote Me!, 8 September 2022

The New Yale Book of Quotations 
edited by Fred R. Shapiro.
Yale, 1136 pp., £35, October 2021, 978 0 300 20597 8
Show More
Show More
... garden in the shade. And while the old white rockers are well represented here (Bob Dylan 27, Neil Young 6, Bruce Springsteen 7), there is nothing from Rihanna, and only one line from Jay-Z (‘I’m not afraid of dying/I’m afraid of not trying’). Louis Armstrong and Aretha Franklin get one quotation each, which shows way too little R-E-S-P-E-C-T ...

Keep him as a curiosity

Steven Shapin: Botanic Macaroni, 13 August 2020

The Multifarious Mr Banks: From Botany Bay to Kew, the Natural Historian Who Shaped the World 
by Toby Musgrave.
Yale, 386 pp., £25, April 2020, 978 0 300 22383 5
Show More
Show More
... John Gascoigne situated Banks in the context of the English Enlightenment and the empire; Neil Chambers in 2007 contextualised Banks in the history of collecting; Patricia Fara has a rollicking go at Banks as an exploitative imperialist in Sex, Botany and Empire (2003); Banks gets a chapter to himself in Richard Holmes’s much praised The Age of ...

Managing the Nation

Jonathan Parry, 18 March 2021

Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition 
by Edmund Fawcett.
Princeton, 525 pp., £30, October 2020, 978 0 691 17410 5
Show More
Show More
... small businesses, some of whom bought into the Brexit dream and are now living a nightmare. One day, if the Lib Dems position themselves more astutely than they have managed in recent years, it’s possible that they may be rewarded for their party’s consistent hostility to Brexit, but this will take time and some major crisis. Until then, opposition ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2013, 9 January 2014

... on my bike. I had no helmet in those days really because it made me look such a twerp. However one day a car arrived at the house and the chauffeur knocked at the door with a box so light I thought it could only be an orchid. It turns out to be a white crash helmet with a note from Dennis Stevenson saying how his son (with no helmet) had been knocked off his ...

South London Modern

Owen Hatherley, 23 October 2025

Modern Buildings in Blackheath and Greenwich, London 1950-2000 
by Ana Francisco Sutherland.
Park, 415 pp., £35, July 2024, 978 3 03860 342 9
Show More
Dulwich: Mid-Century Oasis 
by Paul Davis, Ian McInnes and Catherine Samy.
RIBA, 207 pp., £27, September 2023, 978 1 915722 31 7
Show More
Show More
... Here you could shop for Panton, Knoll or Eames chairs, World Expo posters or fabrics by Lucienne Day, and leaf through a range of zines, maps and books, while the building around you radiated optimism and repose. Among the books on sale were two about the architecture of postwar South-East London: Ana Francisco Sutherland’s Modern Buildings in Blackheath ...

A Country Emptied

Ian Jack: The Highland Clearances, 7 March 2019

The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed 1600-1900 
by T.M. Devine.
Allen Lane, 464 pp., £25, October 2018, 978 0 241 30410 5
Show More
Show More
... are affected strangely by any place from which the tide of life has ebbed,’ the novelist Neil Gunn wrote in 1935, thinking of the deserted straths in Sutherland from which his ancestors had been evicted early in the previous century. The Sutherland evictions were notorious. Between 1807 and 1821, agents acting for the Countess of Sutherland and her ...

Conspire Slowly, Act Quickly

David Runciman: Thatcher Undone, 2 January 2020

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography Vol. III: Herself Alone 
by Charles Moore.
Allen Lane, 1072 pp., £35, October 2019, 978 0 241 32474 5
Show More
Show More
... the merits of membership in order to hold her government together, Thatcher refused to name the day, or even to indicate that a time would come when she could. Doing so, she felt, would be another open invitation for speculators to target the pound. Lawson and Howe were stymied by her intransigence but realised there was little they could do about ...

The Party in Government

Conor Gearty, 9 March 1995

... an inefficient, authoritarian, hypocritical and morally bankrupt administration almost since the day it took office in 1979. Its ministers have been resigning (or not resigning) in disgrace ever since its inception. The nepotism shown towards its ‘family’ of opportunistic supporters has been evident from the start but has now grown to such a level that ...

Kebabs are consequential

Adam Mars-Jones: On Kiran Desai, 23 October 2025

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny 
by Kiran Desai.
Hamish Hamilton, 670 pp., £25, September, 978 0 241 77082 5
Show More
Show More
... during the Hindu-Sikh riots of 1984. ‘There is nothing one man can do against a mob,’ he says. Neil, the Sikh host of the dinner, escaped in 1984 only because he tore from his wrist the kara that would have identified him. If he had been wearing a turban he would have been burned alive. In the car on the way home from the party Papa says that some women ...
... down.’ Even this statement – released after several days’ pregnant silence on 21 August, the day the coup collapsed – stopped short of condemning the coup or demanding Gorbachev’s return. Perhaps a truer indication of how desperately the Party lags reality is to be glimpsed from the current (70th-birthday) issue of the Party journal, the African ...

To Serve My Friends

Jonathan Parry, 27 January 2022

Trust and Distrust: Corruption in Office in Britain and Its Empire, 1600-1850 
by Mark Knights.
Oxford, 488 pp., £35, December 2021, 978 0 19 879624 4
Show More
Show More
... imperial territories. Hilaire Belloc’s National League for Clean Government had a field day, as did others who hated Lloyd George’s demagoguery and radicalism. After Lloyd George became prime minister in 1916, many wealthy businessmen who had benefited financially from the expanded war state received honours: more than 1800 new knights were ...

The Race-Neutral Delusion

Randall Kennedy, 10 August 2023

... in a majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, concurring opinions by Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, and dissents by Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.* Roberts held that the admissions programmes at Harvard and UNC ran afoul of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which ...

Secrets are best kept by those who have no sense of humour

Alan Bennett: Why I turned down ‘Big Brother’, 2 January 2003

... to disrupt the process, even stop up the hole with chewing gum but resist it. Another sunny warm day but with a strong wind that ruffles the lavender (and makes landing for the hornets tricky). 1 August. A propos Jeffrey Archer. I am rereading the Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters and come across this remark by George Lyttelton: ‘Sprinters always try to beat ...

A History of Disappointment

Jackson Lears: Obama’s Parents, 5 January 2012

The Other Barack: The Bold and Reckless Life of President Obama’s Father 
by Sally Jacobs.
Public Affairs, 336 pp., £20, July 2011, 978 1 58648 793 5
Show More
A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother 
by Janny Scott.
Riverhead, 384 pp., £18.99, May 2011, 978 1 59448 797 2
Show More
Show More
... was apparently untroubled by the conversion.) Barack went to a mission school run by Seventh-Day Adventists, walking three miles but, unlike his classmates, wearing shoes. His father told him: ‘I want you to go beyond where I am.’ On returning home each day, the boy was required to recite sums to his father while ...

Gaelic Gloom

Colm Tóibín: Brian Moore, 10 August 2000

Brian Moore: The Chameleon Novelist 
by Denis Sampson.
Marino, 344 pp., IR£20, October 1998, 1 86023 078 4
Show More
Show More
... not remember that she sang all night and has to face her landlady and her fellow boarders the next day is a piece of dynamite. In a society where, as Miss Hearne says, men are gods, how do you go about dramatising them? In a society where women’s vulnerability is open and public, where women are alert to their shifting position, watchful, under the bony ...

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences