Search Results

Advanced Search

286 to 300 of 322 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

The Olympics Scam

Iain Sinclair: The Razing of East London, 19 June 2008

... club in the old Limehouse Town Hall. I attended this public debate and heard the Hackney solicitor Bill Parry-Davies describe, quietly, remorselessly, how, after a series of mysterious fires, Dalston Lane had lost its Victorian theatre and sections of Georgian terrace, facilitating the new transport hub that would service the vital axes, south to the ...

Good New Idea

John Lanchester: Universal Basic Income, 18 July 2019

... of the kind of people who have expressed public support for UBI – Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, Hillary Clinton – has led to scepticism on the left. The Basic Income Earth Network is so troubled by the free-for-all libertarian version of its ideas that it has adopted a resolution rejecting the anti-welfare state version of ...

Too Obviously Cleverer

Ferdinand Mount: Harold Macmillan, 8 September 2011

Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan 
by D.R. Thorpe.
Pimlico, 887 pp., £16.99, September 2011, 978 1 84413 541 7
Show More
The Macmillan Diaries Vol. II: Prime Minister and After 1957-66 
edited by Peter Catterall.
Macmillan, 758 pp., £40, May 2011, 978 1 4050 4721 0
Show More
Show More
... you weren’t ruthless enough.’ When Eden offered him the Exchequer, Macmillan did a Gordon Brown: insisting that ‘as chancellor, I must be undisputed head of the home front, under you’ and that there could be no question of his predecessor, Butler, being accorded the title of deputy prime minister. Barely a year later, after the Suez debacle, he ...

Self-Made Man

Ruth Bernard Yeazell: Edith Wharton’s Domestic Arrangements, 5 April 2007

Edith Wharton 
by Hermione Lee.
Chatto, 853 pp., £25, February 2007, 978 0 7011 6665 6
Show More
Show More
... mother, who responded to the 11-year-old’s opening lines – ‘“Oh, how do you do, Mrs Brown?” said Mrs Tompkins. “If only I had known you were going to call I should have tidied up the drawing-room”’ – by icily observing: ‘Drawing-rooms are always tidy.’ That put a stop to fiction for a time. But Lucretia Jones’s capacity to freeze ...

This Concerns Everyone

James Butler: Crisis in Care, 2 March 2023

Labours of Love: The Crisis of Care 
by Madeleine Bunting.
Granta, 325 pp., £9.99, May 2021, 978 1 78278 381 7
Show More
The Care Crisis: What Caused It and How Can We End It? 
by Emma Dowling.
Verso, 248 pp., £9.99, March 2022, 978 1 78663 035 3
Show More
Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care and the Planet 
by Nancy Fraser.
Verso, 190 pp., £20, September 2022, 978 1 83976 123 2
Show More
Show More
... a major overhaul in funding and provision. Andy Burnham, health secretary in the dying days of the Brown government, proposed a National Care Service, to be funded by a compulsory levy on estates. This remains the closest Britain has come to a solution. The plan collapsed in a cynical act of political arson, as Osborne saw a potent campaign tool in the ...

In the Shadow of Silicon Valley

Rebecca Solnit: Losing San Francisco, 8 February 2024

... build a post-apocalyptic bunker in a remote part of New Zealand’s South Island was rejected, but Bill Gates, now only the world’s eighth richest person, has his own island in Belize. Oracle’s Larry Ellison, the world’s fourth richest person, owns 98 per cent of the Hawaiian island of Lanai, resort hotels and all, which he’s made an inhospitable place ...

One Summer in America

Eliot Weinberger, 26 September 2019

... abolitionist, to replace Andrew Jackson, the slave owner known as the Indian Killer, on the $20 bill. Steve Mnuchin, the secretary of the treasury, states that this will not be possible until at least 2028 and probably not at all. Trump has a portrait of Jackson hanging in the Oval Office.*As his attacks on Cummings and Baltimore continue, the president ...

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
... calculating style of their son. Dunham was a resourceful single mother attracted to exotic brown men. Having returned to the East-West Center in 1963 to study anthropology, she met Lolo Soetoro, a Javanese graduate student who was easygoing and patient – the opposite of Barack Sr. They were married in March 1964. Little more than a year later, after ...

A Common Assault

Alan Bennett: In Italy, 4 November 2004

... no food to be had, and so walk back to the square where we have coffee and a sandwich. Paying the bill, I ask the woman at the counter the whereabouts of the sea, and she points me down the road. It’s now about eleven o’clock. And as I write these prosaic details down – the cashier, the time, the people sitting outside – I realise it’s in an effort ...

What does a snake know, or intend?

David Thomson: Where Joan Didion was from, 18 March 2004

Where I Was From 
by Joan Didion.
Flamingo, 240 pp., £14.99, March 2004, 0 00 717886 7
Show More
Show More
... between the living and the dead, and a faith in the American project that turns not just on the Bill of Rights but on the acquired faith of the 19th century, and even the years up to 1945, that the project was entered into in common. (It’s worth recalling that Didion was ten when the war ended, with a father in uniform. You can feel that young mood in her ...

‘Make sure you say that you were treated properly’

Gareth Peirce: Torture, Secrecy and the British State, 14 May 2009

... paid Arar millions of dollars in compensation. As recently as the beginning of April, in contrast, Bill Rammell, our Foreign Office minister with responsibility for the sharing of information about terrorism, visited Damascus despite the disappearance in Syria weeks before of two British citizens. The Foreign Office, attempting to reassure the families that ...

We Are Many

Tom Crewe: In the Corbyn Camp, 11 August 2016

... talking, honest politics’, the slogan goes). For the latter, the worry is not simply Corbyn’s brown jackets and red ties, but the instinctive feeling that he would look out of place outside Downing Street. (Anyone who rules instinct out as a force in politics is naive.) Corbynites would no doubt reply, with some justice, that we need to reconceptualise ...

War is noise

Jonathan Raban: Letters from My Father, 17 December 2020

... its massive steel doors wide open and its landing ramp fully extended beyond the bow. Major Bill Kerr, commander of 265 Battery and my father’s friend, stood on the lip of the ramp. When he felt the ship’s stern shudder as it scraped the bottom, he stepped forward into what he thought would be ankle-deep water but turned out to come up to his ...

Is this fascism?

Daniel Trilling, 5 June 2025

Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilisation 
by Richard Seymour.
Verso, 280 pp., £20, October 2024, 978 1 80429 425 3
Show More
Show More
... be a way of masking the failings of our political systems, from which far-right populism emerged. Bill Clinton’s former secretary of state Madeleine Albright bemoaned the implications of a Trump presidency for American global leadership in Fascism: A Warning (2018), one of a glut of such books that followed the populist election upsets of 2016, without ...

While Statues Sleep

Thomas Laqueur, 18 June 2020

Learning from the Germans: Confronting Race and the Memory of Evil 
by Susan Neiman.
Allen Lane, 415 pp., £20, August 2019, 978 0 241 26286 3
Show More
Show More
... known as redlining – that had especially pernicious effects in Northern cities. The GI Bill was locally administered, which gave racist petty bureaucrats every opportunity to discriminate.It would be easier to come to terms with the past if Americans could contrive to label one particular period or decision as the paradigmatic crime of a criminal ...

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