Search Results

Advanced Search

346 to 360 of 1977 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Frank Auerbach’s London

T.J. Clark: Frank Auerbach, 10 September 2015

... a viewer, seeing) something that is truly senseless and preposterous as it comes into being, unknown and unidentifiable, and therefore, if you’re lucky, a glimpse of freedom, a unique particular, a way to slip off the mind-forg’d manacles. The zigzags are the manacles. I hope my elation at the yellow and blue wasn’t just the constable’s ...

Mere Life or More Life?

Glen Newey: Bad Arguments, 14 July 2011

Great Books, Bad Arguments: ‘Republic’, ‘Leviathan’ and ‘The Communist Manifesto’ 
by W.G. Runciman.
Princeton, 127 pp., £13.95, March 2010, 978 0 691 14476 4
Show More
Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy 
by Bonnie Honig.
Princeton, 197 pp., £15.95, August 2011, 978 0 691 15259 2
Show More
Show More
... breathless dispatches from history’s front line, to be endlessly recycled thereafter for reasons unknown. Instead, Runciman puts down the texts’ durability to grammatical modality. They swap the indicative or imperative mood for what he calls, at the end of the book, ‘optative’ sociology. This neither describes nor directly enjoins, but imagines how ...

What Can You Know?

Adam Phillips: Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost, 26 April 2007

The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million 
by Daniel Mendelsohn.
Harper, 512 pp., £25, April 2007, 978 0 00 725193 3
Show More
Show More
... I knew to be the 21-year-old Shmiel while the identity of the other one was impossible to guess, unknown and unknowable . . . Unknown and unknowable: this could be frustrating, but also produced a certain allure. The photographs of Shmiel and his family were, after all, more fascinating than the other family pictures ...

Travelling Text

Marina Warner: ‘The Arabian Nights’, 18 December 2008

The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights 
translated by Malcolm Lyons, with Ursula Lyons.
Penguin, 2715 pp., £125, November 2008, 978 0 14 091166 4
Show More
‘The Arabian Nights’ in Historical Context: Between East and West 
edited by Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum.
Oxford, 337 pp., £55, November 2008, 978 0 19 955415 7
Show More
Show More
... as Shaftesbury’s comment makes clear, it allowed magic, lust and cruelty to be portrayed as unknown, foreign and inimical. This double dynamic, sometimes contained within a single individual’s response, both attracts readers to the stories and repels them. Anthony Hamilton, an urbane Jacobite aristocrat and soldier, living in Paris in exile at the ...

A Positive Future

David Simpson: Ernst Cassirer, 26 March 2009

Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture 
by Edward Skidelsky.
Princeton, 288 pp., £24.95, January 2009, 978 0 691 13134 4
Show More
The Symbolic Construction of Reality: The Legacy of Ernst Cassirer 
edited by Jeffrey Andrew Barash.
Chicago, 223 pp., £26.50, January 2009, 978 0 226 03686 1
Show More
Show More
... one leads to the other. He does however say that the apprehension of the symbol suggests some ‘unknown’ (unbekannte) connection between the theoretical and the practical spheres, and that such a connection is often implicit in the common language, as when we attribute moral qualities to non-human things; so a tree may be ‘majestic’ or fields ...

Liberation Music

Richard Gott: In Memory of Cornelius Cardew, 12 March 2009

Cornelius Cardew: A Life Unfinished 
by John Tilbury.
Copula, 1069 pp., £45, October 2008, 978 0 9525492 3 9
Show More
Show More
... Keith Rowe and the drummer Eddie Prévost in the ensemble AMM (an acronym whose meaning remains unknown). In 1968, as revolutionary ideas spread through institutions of higher education, notably art schools, Cardew was asked to set up an experimental music workshop at Morley College, an adult education centre in South London. His class attracted musical ...

Living the Life

Andrew O’Hagan, 6 October 2016

Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood’s Creative Artists Agency 
by James Andrew Miller.
Custom House, 703 pp., £20, August 2016, 978 0 06 244137 9
Show More
Show More
... who makes the bullets for the agent to fire. A brilliant agent will typically have an arsenal unknown to the client, and unknown to anyone. Such an agent will know what the plan is before the client is out of bed in the morning. He will build a career, not do a deal; he will see the bumps in the road and smooth them, or ...

Episteme, My Arse

Christopher Tayler: Laurent Binet, 15 June 2017

The Seventh Function of Language 
by Laurent Binet, translated by Sam Taylor.
Harvill Secker, 390 pp., £16.99, May 2017, 978 1 910701 58 4
Show More
Show More
... turns out that they’re all attracted by a mysterious document entrusted to Barthes by persons unknown, a document that had vanished by the time he reached the hospital. This short text had to do with a ‘seventh function of language’, a phrase that Simon is able to unpack with reference to the functions ...

Itch to Shine

Freya Johnston: Austen’s Suitors, 20 March 2025

Love and Marriage in the Age of Jane Austen 
by Rory Muir.
Yale, 407 pp., £25, February 2024, 978 0 300 26960 4
Show More
Show More
... her concerns. Once the novel has reached its climax, the marriage that ensues remains unseen and unknown. Emma (1815) is unusual even in describing, in its final paragraph, the heroine’s wedding. But the fact that Austen herself had a keen sense of what her characters did next was revealed by her nephew and early biographer, James Edward Austen-Leigh. He ...

Unicorn or Narwhal?

Lorraine Daston: Linnaeus makes the rules, 22 February 2024

The Man Who Organised Nature: The Life of Linnaeus 
by Gunnar Broberg, translated by Anna Paterson.
Princeton, 484 pp., £35, July 2023, 978 0 691 21342 2
Show More
Show More
... some twelve thousand species; today there are at least 1.8 million named species, and many more unknown. But what is a species? Since Darwin, biologists have caricatured Linnaeus as the arch-defender of the fixity of species. It is true that in his earlier works Linnaeus stated that God had created a fixed number of species; seeming novelties, such as the ...

Sugar-Paper Blue

Ruth Fainlight, 16 December 1993

... became – I found what can only be called ‘a slim volume’, with limp covers, in an unknown script and language. I don’t remember Aunt Ann translating one line from its pages, nor ever explaining how she came to own it. But she told me some facts about the woman who wrote it – the first time I heard those words: Anna Akhmatova ...

Gossip

Frank Kermode, 5 June 1997

The Untouchable 
by John Banville.
Picador, 405 pp., £15.99, May 1997, 0 330 33931 1
Show More
Show More
... of booze, snobbery, sodomy and that hopelessly abstract tenderness for the lower classes, unknown except as subordinates and bed fellows. Some scenes, some dialogue, remind one of the early Angus Wilson. Others recall Anthony Powell’s Poussin-dominated series of novels and also, at moments, that writer’s earlier work. Yet Banville’s own style is ...
Lost 
by Hans-Ulrich Treichel, translated by Carol Brown Janeway.
Picador, 145 pp., £10, January 2000, 0 330 39093 7
Show More
Show More
... cast in plaster so that the imprints of their soles can be compared with those of the 15-year-old unknown who may be the narrator’s brother. The macabre element is reinforced by a chance encounter with a hearse-driver in the carpark outside the university canteen, which, the driver tells them, is famous for its ‘cordon bleu’ cooking. This loquacious ...

Diary

A.J.P. Taylor: Habits, 1 March 1984

... Helen Demuth had a son, Freddy, who became a close friend of Eleanor’s. Freddy’s father was unknown. When Engels was dying, Eleanor asked him: ‘Who is Freddy’s father?’ Engels, who had already lost the power of speech, took a pencil and wrote: ‘KM is FD’s father.’ Eleanor was distressed beyond measure. However, when Freddy died he was buried ...

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