Search Results

Advanced Search

301 to 315 of 466 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Having Fun

David Coward: Alexandre Dumas, 17 April 2003

Viva Garibaldi! Une Odyssée en 1860 
by Alexandre Dumas.
Fayard, 610 pp., €23, February 2002, 2 213 61230 7
Show More
Show More
... to France in 1786 and, taking his mother’s name, became a soldier. During the Revolution, he rose through the ranks and was a general at 33. He was a man of commanding presence, great courage and colossal physical strength: it was said that ‘the Black Devil’ could hold four rifles at the end of his outstretched arm, one finger in each barrel. In ...

The Frowniest Spot on Earth

Will Self: Life in the Aerotropolis, 28 April 2011

Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next 
by John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay.
Allen Lane, 480 pp., £14.99, March 2011, 978 1 84614 100 3
Show More
Show More
... fly. Lindsay excitedly crunches the numbers: ‘In the 30 years between 1975 and 2005, global GDP rose 154 per cent, while world trade grew 355 per cent. Meanwhile, the value of air cargo climbed an astonishing 1395 per cent. More than a third of all the goods traded in the world, some $3 trillion worth – but barely one per cent of its weight! – travels ...

Red silk is the best blood

David Thomson: Sondheim, 16 December 2010

Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-81), with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes 
by Stephen Sondheim.
Virgin, 445 pp., £30, October 2010, 978 0 7535 2258 5
Show More
Show More
... school in Pennsylvania, where he made friends with the son of Oscar Hammerstein, the lyricist for Richard Rodgers. (The young Sondheim went to see their pioneering show Oklahoma! when it opened in 1943.) Hammerstein recognised Sondheim’s talent, began to educate him in musical theatre and became a father-figure. It comes as a modest surprise now when ...

The Medium is the Market

Hal Foster: Business Art, 9 October 2008

... cost of both making and exhibiting, whether the works in question are the massive sculptures of Richard Serra, the lavish performances, films and installations of Matthew Barney, or the light-and-space extravaganzas of Olafur Eliasson. As a result, however international the clientele of high-end art might be, it remains highly exclusive: a tight system of ...

Working under Covers

Paul Laity: Mata Hari, 8 January 2004

Female Intelligence: Women and Espionage in the First World War 
by Tammy Proctor.
New York, 205 pp., $27, June 2003, 0 8147 6693 5
Show More
Show More
... legend.’ She also has a mesmeric smile, devouring eyes, a cloud of fair hair and ‘a bosom that rose and fell in a kind of sigh’. It’s hardly surprising that Sandy Arbuthnot falls for this sex goddess of espionage; even Richard Hannay is tempted: ‘I hated her instinctively, hated her intensely, but longed to arouse ...

Why didn’t he commit suicide?

Frank Kermode: Reviewing T.S. Eliot, 4 November 2004

T.S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews 
by Jewel Spears Brooker.
Cambridge, 644 pp., £80, May 2004, 0 521 38277 7
Show More
Show More
... continues. Eliot’s stock seems at present rather low. The second curve, the curve of adulation, rose steeply until the 1930s, when it flattened out, to be restored to rotundity in the poet’s later years. Perhaps it has now levelled off. The appearance of Valerie Eliot’s edition of The Waste Land in 1971 provided a new context for argument. It was well ...

The Danger of Giving In

Andrew Saint: George Gilbert Scott Jr, 17 October 2002

An Architect of Promise: George Gilbert Scott Jr (1839-97) and the Late Gothic Revival 
by Gavin Stamp.
Shaun Tyas, 427 pp., £49.50, July 2002, 1 900289 51 2
Show More
Show More
... walls, as in a Wren City church, were juxtaposed with piers cased in timber at the base which then rose into arches without capitals in between – all most irregular. It took years to furnish St Agnes with the wealth of screens and fittings Scott wanted. All Hallows never got that far before funds ran dry. It is often said that the late Victorian ...

Bus Lane Strategy

Tristram Hunt: London Governments, 31 October 2002

Governing London 
by Ben Pimlott and Nirmala Rao.
Oxford, 208 pp., £15.99, May 2002, 0 19 924492 8
Show More
Show More
... Normans and the absolutism of the Stuarts, in the Victorian era the Saxon witenagemot mystically rose again in the form of city council chambers. Civic self-government became a symbol of British identity. ‘On the other side of the Channel, Paris is France, but no such rule applies with us,’ the Birmingham Daily Press ...

King Cling

Julian Bell: Kings and Collectors, 5 April 2018

Charles I: King and Collector 
Royal Academy, London, until 15 April 2018Show More
Charles II: Art and Power 
Queen’s Gallery/London, until 13 May 2018Show More
Show More
... history-aware viewer who registers also the dragon-vanquishing knight-cum-king, the fair English rose he’s redeeming, and the notional ‘poor folk’ who look on in hope of salvation, sharing the foreground with a hideous slough of dragon-chewed corpses. This heartfelt conservative fantasia was painted in the early 1630s. Charles’s grapples with the ...

Diary

David Trotter: Bearness, 7 November 2019

... in the foreground, and behind him a small and rather startled bear on a leash. Morris and Rose Michtom, who ran a store in Brooklyn, created a novelty toy based on the cartoon – advertising it, with the president’s consent, as ‘Teddy’s Bear’. The bear Teddy did not shoot died anyway.There has been a lot of violence to disavow. Grizzlies loom ...

This Guilty Land

Eric Foner: Every Possible Lincoln, 17 December 2020

Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times 
by David S. Reynolds.
Penguin, 1066 pp., £33.69, September, 978 1 59420 604 7
Show More
The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln and the Struggle for American Freedom 
by H.W. Brands.
Doubleday, 445 pp., £24, October, 978 0 385 54400 9
Show More
Show More
... raid on Harper’s Ferry and its aftermath. In military terms, the event was a disaster. No slaves rose up to join Brown (in fact there weren’t very many in the mountains of what is now West Virginia, where the arsenal was located, far from the plantation belt). After commandeering weaponry, Brown abandoned his plan to retreat into the Alleghenies and fight ...

Thirty-Eight Thousand Bunches of Sweet Peas

Jonathan Parry: Lord Northcliffe’s Empire, 1 December 2022

The Chief: The Life of Lord Northcliffe 
by Andrew Roberts.
Simon & Schuster, 545 pp., £25, August 2022, 978 1 3985 0869 9
Show More
Show More
... best estimate of the amount of gold held by the Bank of England on a given future day. Circulation rose enormously because of canny publicity, and because entrants had to find five witnesses for their guess. Harmsworth was the one who made real money from the competition: the winner died of TB eight years later. He branched out into new publications, notably ...

Not Cricket

Peter Phillips: On Charles Villiers Stanford, 6 February 2025

Charles Villiers Stanford: Man and Musician 
by Jeremy Dibble.
Boydell, 701 pp., £70, April 2024, 978 1 78327 795 7
Show More
Show More
... necessarily make them good composers, of course, but their standing and visibility in society rose and with it the standing of classical music more generally. The first organist at St Paul’s to receive a knighthood was John Goss, though he had to wait until his retirement in 1872. After that new organists often got one immediately. The pattern at the ...

Diary

Nicholas Pearson: On the Chess Circuit, 20 February 2025

... one slumped at the table, his head in his hands. For the first time in more than four hours, Ding rose from his chair and marched off to snack on some walnuts. A few minutes later, Gukesh offered his hand in resignation. The championship was suddenly set alight.The image of a chessboard with pieces in play contains a tangle of symbolic suggestions, many of ...
... barefoot or otherwise. I then went to see K. B. McFarlane. My special subject in Schools was Richard II so I had been to McFarlane’s lectures on the Lollard Knights; I also had a copy of some notes on his 1953 Ford Lectures that was passed down from year to year in Exeter. I knew of his austere reputation and of his reluctance to publish from David ...

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