Search Results

Advanced Search

361 to 375 of 861 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Oh God, can we face it?

Daniel Finn: ‘The BBC’s Irish Troubles’, 19 May 2016

The BBC’s ‘Irish Troubles’: Television, Conflict and Northern Ireland 
by Robert Savage.
Manchester, 298 pp., £70, May 2015, 978 0 7190 8733 2
Show More
Show More
... facts presented in his account, and in those of pioneering media critics such as Liz Curtis and David Miller, suggest that a more critical verdict would not be out of place.* The early years of broadcasting in Northern Ireland had been safe and somnolent, as Savage describes. After BBC Northern Ireland was established between the wars, its directors quickly ...

Only Sleeping

Anne Barton: Variations on Elizabeth I, 10 July 2003

England’s Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy 
by Michael Dobson and Nicola J. Watson.
Oxford, 348 pp., £19.99, November 2002, 0 19 818377 1
Show More
Show More
... was teasingly fond, or any of her other and more handsome suitors, she lived for a long time in peace and prosperity, governed her kingdom well, repelled its enemies and won the hearts and praise of most of her subjects. She has never really died. This is at once the stuff of fairytale, and it is not. Certainly no social worker today could be blamed for ...

The Unmaking of the President

Benjamin Barber, 7 October 1982

The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power 
by Garry Wills.
Atlantic/Little, Brown, 310 pp., $14.95, February 1982, 0 316 94385 1
Show More
Show More
... out of fear, even at the risk of nuclear war, and never fear to negotiate, even at the risk of peace. The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Test Ban Treaty were twin feats of a single charisma. A thousand days later the President was dead in Dallas: the myth of Camelot had the martyrdom which would make it the American legend of our times. The atmosphere of ...

Peasants in Arms

Geoffrey Hosking: Russia v. Napoleon, 3 December 2009

Russia against Napoleon: The Battle for Europe, 1807 to 1814 
by Dominic Lieven.
Allen Lane, 618 pp., £30, October 2009, 978 0 7139 9637 1
Show More
Show More
... to extol the heroism and patriotism of their soldiers and peasants. The spirit of War and Peace still hovers over them. Western accounts are more sober, and tend to see things from the French point of view, thanks to the massive amount of available French documentation. They emphasise Napoleon’s mistakes, the effects of winter and the travails of ...

Mothers and Others

Nicholas Spice: Coetzee’s Multistorey Consciousness, 7 March 2024

‘The Pole’ and Other Stories 
by J.M. Coetzee.
Harvill Secker, 255 pp., £20, October 2023, 978 1 78730 405 5
Show More
Show More
... of torture in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). When, at the emotional climax of Disgrace (1999), David Lurie embraces his daughter to comfort her following her gang rape by three men, she is described as ‘stiff as a pole’. Long after she knows his name, Beatriz insists on thinking of Witold as ‘the Pole’: it’s one of the ways she has of keeping him ...

The Mothering of Montgomery

John Keegan, 2 July 1981

Monty: The Making of a General, 1887-1942 
by Nigel Hamilton.
Hamish Hamilton, 871 pp., £12, June 1981, 0 241 10583 8
Show More
The War between the Generals: Inside the Allied High Command 
by David Irving.
Allen Lane, 446 pp., £9.95, June 1981, 0 7139 1344 4
Show More
Show More
... with ... is old and decrepit and should go at once ... should be sent away to end his life in peace ... is quite unfit to be a Major-General ... is far too old and quite unfit to command ... is idle and has taken to drink ... is completely and utterly useless’. Sustained by treasure-trove of this sort, the reader will persist to the end. But he will ...

The Groom Stripped Bare by His Suitor

Jeremy Harding: John Lennon, 4 January 2001

Lennon Remembers 
by Jann Wenner.
Verso, 151 pp., £20, October 2000, 1 85984 600 9
Show More
Show More
... Worry Kyoko’ and ‘John, John’, Yoko’s contributions to the Plastic Ono Band’s Live Peace in Toronto 1969 – but you could always spin back to Rubber Soul or Revolver for a big family get-together, repatriating Lennon to the land from which he’d done a very noisy runner. ‘That . . . album with the drawing by Klaus Voorman on it,’ he ...

Betting big, winning small

David Runciman: Blair’s Gambles, 20 May 2004

... pursuit of wealth and power. Though Eden forfeited his premiership, his physical wellbeing and his peace of mind as a result of Suez, the one thing he did not sacrifice was his popularity with the British public. Where Blair’s approval ratings have steadily declined since the end of a war he won, Eden’s approval ratings steadily rose following a war he ...

Worst Birthday Cake Ever

Adam Mars-Jones: On Dominique Fernandez, 20 March 2025

Les Trois Femmes de ma vie 
by Dominique Fernandez.
Philippe Rey, 257 pp., €20, October 2024, 978 2 38482 114 3
Show More
Show More
... was L’Étoile rose, published in 1978, polemical, didactic and occasionally soupy. The narrator, David, welcomes the arrival of the word ‘gay’ in France from America, comparing it to the dove returning to Noah’s Ark with its message of hope, though he admits it hasn’t quite taken to its new habitat. In the new memoir as well as in L’Étoile rose ...

Downhill Racer

John Sutherland, 16 August 1990

Lying together 
by D.M. Thomas.
Gollancz, 255 pp., £13.95, June 1990, 0 575 04802 6
Show More
The Neon Bible 
by John Kennedy Toole.
Viking, 162 pp., £12.99, March 1990, 0 670 82908 0
Show More
Solomon Gursky was here 
by Mordecai Richler.
Chatto, 576 pp., £13.95, June 1990, 0 394 53995 8
Show More
Death of the Soap Queen 
by Peter Prince.
Bloomsbury, 277 pp., £13.99, April 1990, 0 7475 0611 6
Show More
Show More
... to 1953 and is set in rural Mississippi, a landscape of baked clay and shacks with cinder yards. David, the hero-narrator, grows up an only child in redneck poverty. His shiftless father drifts from job to job, beats his wife and lets David get beaten up by young thugs his own age. The family are ostracised by respectable ...

Writing the Night

Hugh Haughton, 25 January 1996

Selected Poems 
by David Gascoyne.
Enitharmon, 253 pp., £8.95, November 1994, 1 870612 34 5
Show More
Show More
... In the Thirties and early Forties the English poet David Gascoyne was much enamoured of the Continental, Late Romantic image of writing and of the writer as a visionary misfit. By the end of the Thirties, his place in the great Euro-Visionary Song Contest was almost secured. He confessed his ambition in his Journals in 1938: Want to write an essay on ‘The Apotheosis of Lautréamont ...

Death (and Life) of the Author

Peter Wollen: Kathy Acker, 5 February 1998

... male and female, self and other, the sexual and the political. Writing about Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath , Kathy Acker commented on its nihilism, as she saw it: ‘The sexual is the political realm. There is no engagement.’ Barbara Kruger paid outrageous homage to Acker by rewriting – or, rather, parodying – her work that same ...

Diary

Clive James, 20 May 1982

... Will not reign long as Amnesty’s new chief. Placed under stress he has been known to warp, As David Astor points out with some grief. I must say that Thorpe’s nerve gives cause to gawp. A decent silence should not be so brief. One does feel he might wear more sober togs And do things quietly in aid of dogs. Marcus Aurelius said there’s an age ...

Let’s Cut to the Wail

Michael Wood: The Oresteia according to Anne Carson, 11 June 2009

An Oresteia 
translated by Anne Carson.
Faber, 255 pp., $27, March 2009, 978 0 86547 902 9
Show More
Show More
... offstage, and a chorus (of local women) speaking blindly of freedom for the ‘seed of Atreus’. David Kovacs, another recent translator of Euripides’ Orestes, tells us the play was ‘immensely popular in antiquity’, but this fact only increases his puzzlement, which he shares with Carson. ‘This most baffling play,’ Kovacs says, ‘has a plot that ...

Policing the Police

Fredrick Harris: The Black Panthers, 20 June 2013

Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party 
by Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin.
California, 539 pp., £24.95, January 2013, 978 0 520 27185 2
Show More
Show More
... business district. Some shouted: ‘Pigs go home.’ Others: ‘Fascist police – no justice, no peace.’ One black youth asked in an earnest, defiant tone: ‘As a concerned citizen of the beautiful city of Oakland, can you provide me with a valid reason for what took place the other night to that young man, for being shot in his back?’ He and several ...

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