Search Results

Advanced Search

16 to 30 of 32 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

The Road to West Egg

Thomas Powers, 4 July 2013

Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of ‘The Great Gatsby’ 
by Sarah Churchwell.
Virago, 306 pp., £16.99, June 2013, 978 1 84408 766 2
Show More
The Great Gatsby 
directed by Baz Luhrmann.
Show More
Show More
... when you’re young. ‘I want to be one of the greatest writers who have ever lived,’ Scott Fitzgerald said to his friend Edmund Wilson when they were just out of college, ‘don’t you?’ Wilson was the son of a lawyer, a bit chilly, a prodigious reader steeped in Plato and Dante. He thought Fitzgerald’s remark foolish – just what you might ...

Death in Belgravia

Rosemary Hill, 5 February 2015

A Different Class of Murder: The Story of Lord Lucan 
by Laura Thompson.
Head of Zeus, 422 pp., £20, November 2014, 978 1 78185 536 2
Show More
Show More
... that became Mothercare; the Shand Kydds’ wealth came from wallpaper manufacture; and Ian Maxwell-Scott was employed as a director of the Clermont, having bought his substantial home in Sussex on the proceeds of an insurance policy taken out against his wife having twins, which she did in 1966.For a man with plenty of money and a short attention span it was ...

Terrible to be alive

Julian Symons, 5 December 1991

Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life 
by William Pritchard.
Farrar, Straus, 335 pp., $25, April 1990, 0 374 24677 7
Show More
Randall Jarrell: Selected Poems 
edited by William Pritchard.
Farrar, Straus, 115 pp., $17.95, April 1990, 0 374 25867 8
Show More
Show More
... Prufrock volume can now be seen ‘to stain the whole sea’ of modern verse. His advocacy of Scott Fitzgerald began with, or endured through, the appalling This Side of Paradise to the triumph of Gatsby. Stevens, Cummings, Pound, Crane, Dos Passos: their merits and possibilities of development were noted at an early stage in their careers. For two ...

Ediepus

Michael Neve, 18 November 1982

Edie: An American Biography 
by Jean Stein and George Plimpton.
Cape, 455 pp., £9.95, October 1982, 0 224 02068 4
Show More
Baby Driver: A Story About Myself 
by Jan Kerouac.
Deutsch, 208 pp., £7.95, August 1982, 0 233 97487 3
Show More
Show More
... and discussions with those many souls acquainted with the Sedgwick family, and especially with Edith Minturn Sedgwick, or ‘Edie’ (1943-1971). The result is a long, dull and scary book, where the sense of dullness is actually part of the editorial skill: the skill at making conversations memorable even when they talk of the inevitable slide downhill, in ...

Hatless to Hindhead

Susannah Clapp, 1 May 1980

A Country Calendar 
by Flora Thompson, edited by Margaret Lane.
Oxford, 307 pp., £6.95, October 1979, 9780192117533
Show More
Show More
... money and his garden littered with abandoned attempts at sculpture. Her little brother, who quoted Scott and protected his sister, was killed in action in 1916; her youngest son died in the Second World War. Her husband disapproved of her attempts to write, and his relatives despised her cottage origins. Years in Bournemouth, housebound with babies, were ...

Enfield was nothing

P.N. Furbank: Norman Lewis, 18 December 2003

The Tomb in Seville 
by Norman Lewis.
Cape, 150 pp., £14.99, November 2003, 0 224 07120 3
Show More
Show More
... but resisted, the temptations that Lévi-Strauss is so caustic about, telling Sir Walter Scott that he would not render his travels more marvellous by introducing ‘circumstances which, however true, were of little or no moment, as they related solely to his own personal adventures and escapes’ – the very things which, for good or evil, Evelyn ...

Just William

Doris Grumbach, 25 June 1987

Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice 
by Sharon O’Brien.
Oxford, 544 pp., £22.50, March 1987, 0 19 504132 1
Show More
Show More
... feminine mother who bore seven children, read romantic fiction – including Sir Walter Scott – and dominated her family. There seems to have been much struggle against her daughter’s adolescent ‘William Cather Jr’ role: Willa wanted none of the Southern lady posture and decorum. But the mature Cather came to acccept the unspoken bond to her ...

Sunday Best

Mark Ford: Wilfred Owen’s Letters, 26 September 2024

Selected Letters of Wilfred Owen 
edited by Jane Potter.
Oxford, 436 pp., £25, August 2023, 978 0 19 968950 7
Show More
Show More
... and Ross, by late 1917 he was moving in a circle of gay men that included Osbert Sitwell and C.K. Scott Moncrieff – who would translate Proust and who shared with Owen a love of Alec Waugh’s ardent public school romance, The Loom of Youth (roughly the equivalent of wearing a green carnation). He also met Graves, whose wedding to Nancy Nicholson he ...

I’ll be back

Marjorie Garber: Sequels, 19 August 1999

Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel 
edited by Paul Budra and Betty Schellenberg.
Toronto, 217 pp., £40, February 1999, 0 8020 0915 8
Show More
Show More
... dozens of sequels, from Margaret Dashwood, or Interference (a sequel to Sense and Sensibility by Edith Charlotte Brown, 1929) to Consequence, or Whatever Became of Charlotte Lucas (Elizabeth Newark, 1997) and Desire & Duty: A Sequel to Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ (Ted Bader and Marilyn Bader, 1997) have appeared in print. The further adventures ...

Tit for Tat

Margaret Anne Doody, 21 December 1989

Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology 
edited by Roger Lonsdale.
Oxford, 555 pp., £20, September 1989, 0 19 811769 8
Show More
Show More
... the female sex. The women poets could be rebuked for not writing enough about love, much as Walter Scott rebuked Jane Austen. Women are often accused of fuddling their minds with romantic love, but men seem very disconcerted if they find that romantic love is not on the female agenda. Lonsdale’s collection has very little ‘love poetry’ in the ...

My Castaway This Week

Miranda Carter: Desert Island Dreams, 9 June 2022

... also requested by Gary Glitter (currently serving sixteen years as a convicted paedophile); Ronnie Scott (who asked for a Faye Dunaway doll, though Plomley persuaded him to take a saxophone instead); and the actor and explorer Duncan Carse, who asked for a ‘rubber woman’. Strangely, the BBC website says he asked for a ‘pin-up picture’. Glitter’s ...

Mushroom Cameo

Rosemary Hill: Noël Coward’s Third Act, 29 June 2023

Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward 
by Oliver Soden.
Weidenfeld, 634 pp., £30, March 2023, 978 1 4746 1280 7
Show More
Show More
... eleven of her most popular illustrated tales, including Jeremy Fisher and The Flopsy Bunnies, and Edith Nesbit, who had more or less invented the children’s adventure story, published The Railway Children. Nesbit’s work was shaped by memories of her unhappy childhood and in her novels the cheerful Bastable children offer readers some compensation for the ...

Reasons for Liking Tolkien

Jenny Turner: The Hobbit Habit, 15 November 2001

... such a life women come as a bit of an afterthought, as they do, indeed, in the books. Tolkien met Edith Bratt in 1909, and was forbidden from pursuing the relationship by his priestly guardian. Despite this, they married in 1916 and went on to have four children. From Carpenter’s account in the authorised biography, the relationship seems to have been ...
... into Gard – but is being fiercely resisted by the local party. The Minister for Foreign Trade, Edith Cresson, is having a similarly difficult time after being parachuted into Vienne. The Minister for the Environment, Huguette Bouchardeau, has trekked all over France, being angrily resisted by local (male) vested interests everywhere. The Right has ...

Baffled at a Bookcase

Alan Bennett: My Libraries, 28 July 2011

... There is actually another more modest library, neo-Gothic in style, and built by George Gilbert Scott in 1856. It’s over Exeter’s garden wall in the north-west corner of Radcliffe Square, but you can’t quite see that. This was where I worked, though it was possible if one was so inclined to get to study in the much more exclusive and architecturally ...

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