Search Results

Advanced Search

361 to 375 of 927 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Going Native

Sheila Fitzpatrick: The Maisky Diaries, 3 December 2015

The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St James’s 1932-43 
edited by Gabriel Gorodetsky, translated by Tatiana Sorokina and Oliver Ready.
Yale, 584 pp., £25, September 2015, 978 0 300 18067 1
Show More
Show More
... childhood, Before the Storm (published in London in 1943), Maisky gives a vivid description of a close, earnest, socially-conscious family, atheist but within an Orthodox cultural tradition, an epitome of the progressive intelligentsia that read Shakespeare and Schiller as well as Herzen and Chernyshevsky and, as teachers, doctors and sometimes ...

Diary

Ian Sansom: I was a teenage evangelist, 8 July 2004

... I finish my A-levels. I read the Reverend Richard Wurmbrand’s Tortured for Christ, and Frank Morison’s Who Moved the Stone? I read Nicky Cruz’s Run, Baby, Run, and books by Charles Colson, books which are still in print years after their first publication, Christian megasellers. I also spent a lot of time in prayer, and in daydreams. I was ...

Diary

Gaby Wood: Lucian Freud’s Printmaking, 1 June 2023

... It seemed to me like a premonition of Esther as she is now. I could make no sense of the image up close; the marks defied all conventions. It was a portrait that shouldn’t add up. I fell asleep with the book in my lap, trying to work out where in the dense, rackety lines the likeness lay.The following evening I bumped into Esther in person. On another ...

The Miners’ Strike

Michael Stewart, 6 September 1984

... be a lot – will come, not from the uneconomic pits which the Coal Board is rightly determined to close, but from the new pits – the Selbys and Belvoirs – that it is anxious to develop. The second proposition on which the case for subsidising uneconomic pits rests is that there is no alternative employment in many of the mining areas: better that the men ...

Fellow Freaks

Sam Thompson: Wells Tower, 9 July 2009

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned 
by Wells Tower.
Granta, 238 pp., £10.99, April 2009, 978 1 84708 048 6
Show More
Show More
... weekends spent playing chess continually, his father winning every time: Only once did I come close to beating him. He’d had some cocktails, and he blundered, moving his queen into the path of my knight. I sacked the piece, and he slapped me on the mouth. I ran into the bathroom and punched myself several times to ensure a lasting bruise. When I ...

Nom de Boom

Ian Penman: Arthur Russell's Benediction, 15 August 2024

Travels over Feeling: Arthur Russell, a Life 
by Richard King.
Faber, 296 pp., £30, April, 978 0 571 37966 8
Show More
Show More
... and folksy, but the family lived in a modernist house designed by an uncle who had studied with Frank Lloyd Wright. Russell was named for his father, with whom he seems to have had a fractious but intensely close relationship; an ex-girlfriend remembers being surprised that even in his early twenties Russell still ...

Goodbye Glossies

Amy Larocca: Vogue World, 1 December 2022

A Visible Man 
by Edward Enninful.
Bloomsbury, 265 pp., £25, September 2022, 978 1 5266 4153 3
Show More
Show More
... Lanvin and Valentino. Over the course of his career, Enninful has built a remarkable number of close relationships with the rich, famous and powerful.With so many people moving freely between the two sides of the business, the line between advertising and editorial is, to put it mildly, pretty blurred. It’s ads, not subscriptions or newsstand sales, that ...

Dangerous Liaison

Michael Howard, 27 January 1994

Beacons in the Night: With the OSS and Tito’s Partisans in Wartime Yugoslavia 
by Franklin Lindsay.
Stanford, 383 pp., £19.95, October 1993, 0 8047 2123 8
Show More
Show More
... taking any more initiatives; that his relations with the occupying powers had been suspiciously close; and that he would probably save up any weapons dropped to him to impose a Serb hegemony once the Allies had won the war. Tito, on the other hand, was at least known to be fighting. He was undeterred by German retaliation, which he rightly gauged as being ...

On and Off the Scene

Jessamy Harvey, 6 February 1997

Anti-Gay 
edited by Mark Simpson.
Cassell, 163 pp., £9.99, September 1996, 0 304 33144 9
Show More
Show More
... back-to-basics language, in which people of same-sex desire are portrayed as members of a family, close community or tribe. It is an unfortunate but probably inevitable side-effect of campaigning for equal rights that homosexuals have had to prove that they are not only able to fulfil the responsibilities of citizenship but, absurdly, are better able to do so ...

Proust? Ha!

Michael Hofmann, 21 August 1997

A Book of Memories 
by Péter Nádas, translated by Ivan Sanders and Imre Goldstein.
Cape, 706 pp., £16.99, August 1997, 9780224035248
Show More
Show More
... landscape: this is what Johnny Foreigner is doing, take it or leave it. That’s what shows in Frank O’Hara’s great poem of 1959, ‘The Day Lady Died’, when he buys himself a hamburger and a malted and ‘an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets / in Ghana are doing these days’. Subsequently, foreign titles had something of the status of ...

Homage to André Friedmann

Peter Campbell, 7 November 1985

Robert Capa 
by Richard Whelan.
Faber, 315 pp., £15, October 1985, 0 571 13661 3
Show More
Robert Capa: Photographs 
edited by Cornell Capa and Richard Whelan.
Faber, 242 pp., £15, October 1985, 0 571 13660 5
Show More
Show More
... and he certainly tried to follow his own precept – ‘if the picture is no good you are not close enough.’ But Whelan’s book does make you re-run the great World War Two pictures in your head, and wonder what they tell you about that war. Capa had something of the amoral charm of Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull: ‘It is a favourite theory of ...

Diary

Nigel Hamilton: Writing Books, and Selling Them, 23 October 1986

... Hitchcock’s thriller, on the television, with stringy, frightening music and a wooden plot. I close my eyes but cannot go to sleep. Should I give up business and return to the ‘little’ author I was in Suffolk for almost ten years while working on Monty? Philip Ziegler and others have written kindly about the final Monty volume, hoping that I will not ...
Nixon: A Study in Extremes of Fortune 
by Lord Longford.
Weidenfeld, 205 pp., £8.95, October 1980, 0 297 77708 4
Show More
Show More
... who had said he would walk over his own grandmother to serve the President, and who, in his own frank admission, was responsible for many a dirty trick, which he now regrets bitterly. Even before he went to prison, after the disclosures connected with Watergate, he had undergone a very remarkable Christian conversion. When he emerged, he not only wrote a ...

Poor Harold

C.H. Sisson, 3 December 1981

Harold Nicolson: A Biography. Vo. II: 1930-1968 
by James Lees-Milne.
Chatto, 403 pp., £15, October 1981, 0 7011 2602 7
Show More
Show More
... full the widespread silliness of the Thirties about Russia. ‘Harold was able to have perfectly frank discussions with Maisky, who found him safe as well as sympathetic.’ He felt ‘stricken to the dust’ by the Russo-German pact of 1939, sharing the astonishment with many innocent leftists. Several years later he could still write: ‘Not that I have ...

Looking big

Asa Briggs, 12 March 1992

Isambard Kingdom Brunel: Engineering Knight-Errant 
by Adrian Vaughan.
Murray, 285 pp., £19.95, October 1991, 0 7195 4636 2
Show More
Show More
... gains, and so does the world at large.’ Brunel’s fame eclipsed that of his father. His close friend Daniel Gooch, whose memoirs and diary only became generally available after 1972, called him ‘the greatest of England’s engineers’. Vaughan, who has written many books on railways, does not question Brunel’s genius, yet he accuses Rolt of the ...

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