Search Results

Advanced Search

286 to 300 of 304 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

I’m an intelligence

Joanna Biggs: Sylvia Plath at 86, 20 December 2018

The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vol. I: 1940-56 
edited by Peter Steinberg and Karen Kukil.
Faber, 1388 pp., £35, September 2017, 978 0 571 32899 4
Show More
The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vol. II: 1956-63 
edited by Peter Steinberg and Karen Kukil.
Faber, 1025 pp., £35, September 2018, 978 0 571 33920 4
Show More
Show More
... she is told, ‘but you are in constant danger of falling on your face.’ She took English, art, French and botany and worried constantly about her workload, complaining that she has ‘to keep on like the White Queen to stay in the same place’. When she got a B- in her first English paper, it made her feel ‘slightly sick’. She dated with the fervour ...

The End of Idiocy on a Planetary Scale

Stephen Holmes: ‘The Communist Manifesto’, 29 October 1998

The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition 
by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
Verso, 82 pp., £8, April 1998, 1 85984 898 2
Show More
Show More
... than Marx himself. Perhaps Marx invokes pre-modern values when he is copying French sources and denounces them when thinking on his own. In any case, the incoherence cannot be easily wished or explained away. Moreover, the ‘ice water of calculation’ did not rinse from modern life every last vestige of religious faith, family ...

The Politics of Good Intentions

David Runciman: Blair’s Masochism, 8 May 2003

... and taste for vengeance. (He had earlier acquiesced in the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the leaders of the short-lived Bolshevik uprising in Berlin, deaths which elicited from Weber the memorably heartless response: ‘They called up the street, and the street has dispatched them.’) In Munich, Red Terror was followed by White ...

Out of the Cage

Tom Nairn: Popping the bubble of American supremacy, 24 June 2004

After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order 
by Emmanuel Todd, translated by C. Jon Delogu.
Constable, 288 pp., £8.99, July 2004, 1 84529 058 5
Show More
Bubble of American Supremacy: Correcting the Misuse of American Power 
by George Soros.
Weidenfeld, 207 pp., £12.99, January 2004, 0 297 84906 9
Show More
Show More
... substantial basis for his convictions, rooted in earlier travails and a passionate conviction that Karl Popper had been right, in his view of science and philosophy as well as in the theories of The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). A little later, I and many others were convoked to a seminar at which Ernest Gellner, Soros and Popper himself spoke – it ...

Getting Rich

Pankaj Mishra: In Shanghai, 30 November 2006

... 18th century. He had spent his long exile reading whatever he could find, including books on the French Revolution and Rousseau, on whom he eventually wrote a PhD thesis. Among his discoveries in a bookshop frequented by senior Party leaders had been an account of Gandhi in a book by Chester Bowles, a reluctant Cold Warrior and American ambassador to India ...

Against Passion

James Meek: Passionate Politics, 30 November 2017

The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics 
by Mark Lilla.
Harper, 160 pp., £19, August 2017, 978 0 06 269743 1
Show More
The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction 
by Mark Lilla.
NYRB, 166 pp., £9.99, September 2016, 978 1 59017 902 4
Show More
Show More
... But during the 1970s and 1980s, encouraged by left-wing professors who were inspired, in turn, by French thinkers such as Foucault and Derrida, a new politics disseminated from university campuses that rejected such binding concepts as citizenship and duty. It emphasised the special status individuals could acquire by virtue of their claim to a particular ...

Is this the end of the American century?

Adam Tooze: America Pivots, 4 April 2019

... according to Sargent, because they are both destroyers of international order. In the wake of the French Revolution, Napoleon wrecked what was left of the legitimate order of Europe. Trump, in turn, has apparently ended the American world order, or, as Sargent prefers to call it, Pax Americana. Sargent’s is an extraordinary suggestion, even though ...

Ever Closer Union?

Perry Anderson, 7 January 2021

... an academic in Switzerland – he retained his membership of the NSDAP until 1945. His compatriot Karl Roemer, an advocate-general to the court, spent the war in occupied Paris managing French companies and banks for the Third Reich; after the war, he married Adenauer’s niece, and acted as defence lawyer for the Waffen SS ...

Where on Earth are you?

Frances Stonor Saunders, 3 March 2016

... rank, just above Iraq and Afghanistan. These bottom-liners are unofficially classified as what the French sometimes call the ‘petits pays de merde’ – shitty little countries – and most of the visa-free travel on offer to them is to other shitty little countries. To visit the UK, they need a visa. The Home Office doesn’t publish annual figures for UK ...

Holocaust History

Geoff Eley, 3 March 1983

... History, and in the local bookstore Jewish history covers more space than the whole of German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian and East European history combined. Memoirs, anthologies, coffee-table books, novels and textbooks run thickly from the presses. The high point was reached in the President’s Commission on the Holocaust appointed by Jimmy ...

Opium of the Elite

Jonathan Rée: Hayek in England, 2 February 2023

Hayek: A Life, 1899-1950 
by Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger.
Chicago, 840 pp., £35, November 2022, 978 0 226 81682 1
Show More
Show More
... a comprehensive economic plan. Central planning is usually associated with Marxism, though Karl Marx himself expressed only a vague hope of bringing industry under political control and getting rid of ‘haggling’ (Schacher). Friedrich Engels was more specific, asserting in 1878 that socialism would eliminate the ‘social anarchy’ of capitalist ...

On Sebastiano Timpanaro

Perry Anderson, 10 May 2001

... the emergence during the Restoration of the textual procedures associated with the German scholar Karl Lachmann, usually regarded as the main originator of modern techniques of recension – as opposed to emendation – of ancient texts, which he applied to Lucretius, the Nibelungenlied and St Luke alike. La genesi del metodo del Lachmann assured Timpanaro an ...

The German Question

Perry Anderson: Goodbye to Bonn, 7 January 1999

... the generation of SPD politicians that came to prominence in the Eighties. With fluent French from his borderland upbringing, he is intellectually better prepared than Schröder, with more decided views about the future. As Minister of Finance, and Chairman of the SPD, his position in the new regime is unusually strong. Lafontaine is the first ...

On the library coffee-table

Clive James, 17 March 1983

An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration 
by Mario Praz, translated by William Weaver.
Thames and Hudson, 396 pp., £35, March 1982, 0 500 23358 6
Show More
Degas 
by Keith Roberts.
Phaidon, 48 pp., £10.50, March 1982, 0 7148 2226 4
Show More
Monet at Argenteuil 
by Paul Tucker.
Yale, 211 pp., £15, April 1982, 0 300 02577 7
Show More
Show More
... By now I have managed to bag most of the others on the list, including the Brothers Goncourt on French 18th-century Painters, Cellini’s Life, Baudelaire’s The Mirror of Art, Fromentin’s The Masters of Past Time, and the essential The Journal of Delacroix, which ideally should be owned in no other way. By the time Huizinga’s Erasmus of Rotterdam was ...

Whirligig

Barbara Everett: Thinking about Hamlet, 2 September 2004

... it featured Hamlet, dated from a decade or more earlier; it seems to have taken its events from a French prose narrative of the 1570s, which itself translated and adapted a Norse legend embedded in Saxo Grammaticus’s 13th-century Danish History. The original Norse legend is very brutal and very bloody. The further source or impulse of Elizabethan revenge ...

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