Search Results

Advanced Search

331 to 345 of 372 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

The Health Transformation Army

James Meek: What can the WHO do?, 2 July 2020

... its medical industries. The US has provided some of the WHO’s most dynamic figures, notably Jonathan Mann, who led the organisation’s response to the spread of Aids in the 1980s. In narrative fiction and non-fiction, a stock figure has emerged: the brave, principled, maverick American researcher who leaves the safety of the homeland to plunge into the ...

War as a Rhizome

Fredric Jameson: Genre Trouble, 4 August 2022

... the most touching and tender moments in these works, something it is awkward to point out in our post-Freudian age. The aristocratic Almanach-de-Gotha family lines form a web that transects the whole of the Wehrmacht; their mirror-image is the party network that resists, subtends and extends far beyond them.Bora’s psychology is, however, another matter, as ...

Move like a party

Mendez: George Michael’s Destiny, 5 January 2023

George Michael: A Life 
by James Gavin.
Abrams, 502 pp., £25, June 2023, 978 1 4197 4794 6
Show More
George Michael: Freedom Uncut 
directed by David Austin and George Michael.
Show More
Show More
... Whisper’) and shopped it around to record labels, but ‘Wham Rap!’s message clashed with the post-Falklands mood of triumphant Thatcherite aspiration.Only Innervision, a start-up label backed by CBS Records, would take a chance on Wham! (the name of the label evokes Stevie Wonder’s 1973 album). It was good timing: Michael’s father – never an ...

Four Moptop Yobbos

Ian Penman, 17 June 2021

One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time 
by Craig Brown.
Fourth Estate, 642 pp., £9.99, March, 978 0 00 834003 2
Show More
The Beatles and Sixties Britain 
by Marcus Collins.
Cambridge, 382 pp., £90, March 2020, 978 1 108 47724 6
Show More
The Beatles in Context 
edited by Kenneth Womack.
Cambridge, 372 pp., £74.99, January 2020, 978 1 108 41911 6
Show More
Show More
... from Guatemala to Hungary, Serbia to Switzerland. One act has branched out into its own ‘post-break up’ solo Beatle tribute acts; another, from Brazil, is set to open its own Cavern Club in São Paolo. Beatles tourism belongs to the post-1990s world of arts-led ‘regeneration’ and site-specific ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: Swimming on the 52nd Floor, 24 September 2015

... for out-of-body bliss. Can I carry off the decadence of it? With all those memories of rusty post-industrial rivulets, municipal chlorine tanks, filled-in lidos of a lifetime stretching back through the polio-defying 1950s to coal-dusted Bristol Channel beaches still being cleared of barbed wire and mines. There is no resistance in the Shangri-La ...

The Pocahontas Exception

Thomas Laqueur: America’s Ancestor Obsession, 30 March 2023

A Nation of Descendants: Politics and the Practice of Genealogy in US History 
by Francesca Morgan.
North Carolina, 301 pp., £27.95, October 2021, 978 1 4696 6478 1
Show More
Show More
... to do with actual genealogical practice. Norman Rockwell’s 1959 cover for the Saturday Evening Post, Family Tree, has at the top of the tree an impeccably white baby – not surprising – one far whiter than might be expected from the swarthy and often disreputable ancestry sprouting up from the roots: at the bottom, a pirate is matched with a Spanish ...

Roaming the Greenwood

Colm Tóibín: A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition by Gregory Woods, 21 January 1999

A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition 
by Gregory Woods.
Yale, 448 pp., £24.95, February 1998, 0 300 07201 5
Show More
Show More
... In some places, especially cities, this is the case even now, to the extent that the phrase ‘post-gay’ is slowly becoming current. Therefore, how we read the past, and read into the past, and judge the past are likely to become matters of more open debate. The temptation to make anachronistic judgments and ask anachronistic questions is hard to ...

Blood for Oil?

Retort: The takeover of Iraq, 21 April 2005

... of something more basic: the article’s price. For all the talk lately about the emergence of a post-industrial economy – in which ‘information’ or ‘services’ are displacing the authority of any single material resource – the last few years have been an object lesson in just how vital to capitalist dreams of the future the control of a few ...

In Hyperspace

Fredric Jameson, 10 September 2015

Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative 
by David Wittenberg.
Fordham, 288 pp., £18.99, March 2013, 978 0 8232 4997 8
Show More
Show More
... to share generic features with its more popular cousins, but it doesn’t; Cormac McCarthy and Jonathan Lethem are not of the same genre as Philip K. Dick, however long Margaret Atwood managed to ‘pass’. Indeed, the solution may actually be a rather simple one, namely that modernism is not a genre, while SF emphatically is – and this opens up ...

By All Possible Art

Tobias Gregory: George Herbert, 18 December 2014

Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert 
by John Drury.
Penguin, 396 pp., £9.99, April 2014, 978 0 14 104340 1
Show More
Show More
... every week. Religious revivals prove temporary. The people of Florence soon wearied of Savonarola. Jonathan Edwards, preaching God’s wrath in the 1730s in my home town of Northampton, Massachusetts, brought his congregation to paroxysms of weeping, despair and repentance, but after the ‘great awakening’ had spread through the region and made him ...

Ah, that’s better

Colin Burrow: Orwell’s Anti-Radicalism, 5 October 2023

Orwell: The New Life 
by D.J. Taylor.
Constable, 597 pp., £30, May, 978 1 4721 3296 3
Show More
George Orwell’s Perverse Humanity: Socialism and Free Speech 
by Glenn Burgess.
Bloomsbury, 270 pp., £21.99, May, 978 1 5013 9466 9
Show More
Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life 
by Anna Funder.
Viking, 464 pp., £20, August, 978 0 241 48272 8
Show More
Show More
... at the enemies of the Party on the telescreen. Would Orwell have secretly been delighted by the post-Orwellian sadism of Big Brother the TV series? He certainly understood how groupthink could fuse with sadistic appetites to generate entertainment. But although the Two Minutes Hate in the bath is the kind of thing most people do (or so I want to ...

Hinsley’s History

Noël Annan, 1 August 1985

Diplomacy and Intelligence during the Second World War: Essays in Honour of F.H. Hinsley 
edited by Richard Langhorne.
Cambridge, 329 pp., £27.50, May 1985, 0 521 26840 0
Show More
British Intelligence and the Second World War. Vol. I: 1939-Summer 1941, Vol. II: Mid-1941-Mid-1943, Vol. III, Part I: June 1943-June 1944 
by F.H. Hinsley, E.E. Thomas, C.F.G. Ransom and R.C. Knight.
HMSO, 616 pp., £12.95, September 1979, 0 11 630933 4
Show More
Show More
... German strategy, was Harry Hinsley. After the war, Hinsley returned to Cambridge as a don. Post-war Cambridge was dominated in the humanities, not so much by Leavis, as by Butterfield and Oakeshott, who had founded the Cambridge Journal. Through his famous criticism of rationalism in politics, Oakeshott there questioned the assumptions, motives and ...

As Astonishing as Elvis

Jenny Turner: Ayn Rand, 1 December 2005

Ayn Rand 
by Jeff Britting.
Duckworth, 155 pp., £12.99, February 2005, 0 7156 3269 8
Show More
Show More
... as Roark (Rand was delighted: Cooper was famously right-wing) and Patricia Neal as Dominique. Jonathan Romney, reviewing a 1998 re-release, admired the ‘monumentalist oppressiveness’ of the art direction, then remarked on how strange it was to see the noble Gary Cooper professing not the usual love-of-the-little-fellow tosh, but the joys of the ...

Writer’s Writer and Writer’s Writer’s Writer

Julian Barnes: ‘Madame Bovary’, 18 November 2010

Madame Bovary: Provincial Ways 
by Gustave Flaubert and Lydia Davis.
Penguin, 342 pp., £20, November 2010, 978 1 84614 104 1
Show More
Show More
... writer. So if Rick Moody tells us that Lydia Davis is ‘the best prose stylist in America’, and Jonathan Franzen that ‘few writers now working make the words on the page matter more,’ does this make her better or worse equipped to render the best prose stylist of 19th-century France into 21st-century American English? Davis’s stories, typically from ...

Don’t break that fiddle

Tobias Gregory: Eclectic Imitators, 19 November 2020

Imitating Authors: Plato to Futurity 
by Colin Burrow.
Oxford, 470 pp., £36.99, May 2019, 978 0 19 883808 1
Show More
How the Classics Made Shakespeare 
by Jonathan Bate.
Princeton, 361 pp., £15.99, October 2020, 978 0 691 21014 8
Show More
Show More
... nourishment for writers who seek it out, make it their own, and use it to create something new.Jonathan Bate’s​ How the Classics Made Shakespeare has more modest goals. Bate grants that Shakespeare’s classical influences have often been studied before, but claims that ‘certain aspects of Shakespeare’s classical inheritance have been curiously ...

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