Search Results

Advanced Search

376 to 390 of 2148 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Seen through the Loopholes

David Simpson: ‘War at a Distance’, 11 March 2010

War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime 
by Mary Favret.
Princeton, 262 pp., £18.95, January 2010, 978 0 691 14407 8
Show More
Show More
... and are there stopped in time, not yet falling but not yet safe. In her imagining of this slender means of support as about to fall, or liable to fall, Favret is thinking and feeling after 9/11. That she may have felt the same way before 9/11 occurred doesn’t make this any less true. Modern wartime makes futures out of its present. In Coleridge’s ‘Frost ...

Double Game

David Nirenberg: Maimonides, 23 September 2010

Maimonides in His World 
by Sarah Stroumsa.
Princeton, 222 pp., £27.95, November 2009, 978 0 691 13763 6
Show More
Show More
... sometimes called the ‘doctrine of accommodation’ – by the Arabic word talat.t.uf, which means ‘shrewdness in the service of loving kindness’. (Christians might think here of 1 Corinthians 3.2: ‘I fed you with milk and not solid food, for you were not able to take it.’) From his Cordoban Muslim contemporary Ibn Rushd (known in the West as ...

Un Dret Egal

David A. Bell: Political Sentiment, 15 November 2007

Inventing Human Rights: A History 
by Lynn Hunt.
Norton, 272 pp., £15.99, April 2007, 978 0 393 06095 9
Show More
Show More
... the legislation addressed, but 18th-century fiction. The path she follows is not obvious, by any means – particularly as she has not chosen the fiction that most directly confronted issues of injustice (Candide, say, or Montesquieu’s Persian Letters). Instead, Hunt draws attention to epistolary novels of private lives and loves, above all Richardson’s ...

All of a Tremble

David Trotter: Kafka at the pictures, 4 March 2004

Kafka Goes to the Movies 
by Hanns Zischler, translated by Susan Gillespie.
Chicago, 143 pp., £21, January 2003, 0 226 98671 3
Show More
Show More
... her. Zischler’s method throughout Kafka Goes to the Movies is to develop his argument by means of extensive quotation both from the diaries and letters and from a wide range of additional material, some of it fascinating. He has shown remarkable enterprise and tenacity in tracking down prints of the films Kafka saw, or, where these are no longer ...

The Choice Was Real

David Runciman, 29 June 2017

... looks more like an extension of what happens in Northern Ireland. If a return to the early 1970s means British politics being overshadowed by entrenched divisions in Northern Ireland, then here we go again. But that isn’t what Brexit was designed to achieve. Liberating the British political system from Brussels offers the appearance of a real choice but it ...

Stony Ground

Peter D. McDonald: J.M. Coetzee, 20 October 2005

J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event 
by Derek Attridge.
Chicago, 225 pp., £13.50, May 2005, 0 226 03117 9
Show More
Slow Man 
by J.M. Coetzee.
Secker, 265 pp., £16.99, September 2005, 0 436 20611 0
Show More
Show More
... thinking’, as he put it in his 1987 talk. Attridge believes that thinking about Coetzee’s work means engaging directly with the cultural, ethical and political implications of this commitment. What this means, in practice, is recognising that ‘our’ most cherished critical assumptions and vocabularies might not be up ...

You’ve got to get used to it

John Bayley: David Piper, 15 October 1998

I am well, who are you? 
by David Piper, edited by Anne Piper.
Anne Piper, 96 pp., £12, March 1998, 0 9532123 0 0
Show More
Show More
... be made use of in ways that are contextually effective, and surprisingly original. That is what David Piper contrived to do in a brilliant one-off war novel, Trial by Battle. It describes the experiences of a young officer, the reverse of professional, during the 1941 Malayan campaign between the British-Indian Army and the Japanese: the campaign which led ...

How can it work?

David Runciman: American Democracy, 21 March 2013

... Coast that a federal government is sometimes a useful thing to have. The advent of postal voting means that the day itself is not quite as special as it once was, but it remains the focus of campaigning, and the nexus of all media coverage. It’s when the horse race ends. And no mere act of God is going to move the finish line. This is a system of politics ...

Auchnasaugh

Patrick Parrinder, 7 November 1991

King Cameron 
by David Craig.
Carcanet, 212 pp., £12.95, May 1991, 0 85635 917 3
Show More
The Hungry Generations 
by David Gilmour.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 194 pp., £13.95, August 1991, 1 85619 069 2
Show More
O Caledonia 
by Elspeth Barker.
Hamish Hamilton, 152 pp., £13.99, August 1991, 0 241 13146 4
Show More
Show More
... David Craig has an unfashionable concern with truth-telling in fiction. In his earlier role as a literary critic, he wrote a book called The Real Foundations in which he showed how some of the most respected 19th and 20th-century novelists and poets had blatantly falsified social reality. If a work of realistic fiction is to be convincing in general, according to Craig, it ought to convince us in particulars ...

Different Stories

David Hoy, 8 January 1987

Nietzsche: Life as Literature 
by Alexander Nehamas.
Harvard, 261 pp., £14.95, January 1986, 0 674 62435 1
Show More
Show More
... audience, and as a writer rather than a speaker he must resort to stylistic rather than dialogical means. Style is part of Nietzsche’s philosophical project and not a merely ‘literary’ device because Nietzsche does have something to say to his audience. Although ‘it often seems as if the aim of Nietzsche’s writing is to construct ideas that grip the ...

Shakespeares

David Norbrook, 18 July 1985

Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism 
edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield.
Manchester, 244 pp., £19.50, April 1985, 0 7190 1752 1
Show More
Alternative Shakespeares 
edited by John Drakakis.
Methuen, 252 pp., £10.50, July 1985, 0 416 36850 6
Show More
Shakespeare and Others 
by S. Schoenbaum.
Scolar, 285 pp., £25, May 1985, 0 85967 691 9
Show More
Illustrations of the English Stage 1580-1642 
by R.A. Foakes.
Scolar, 180 pp., £35, February 1985, 0 85967 684 6
Show More
Shakespeare: The ‘Lost Years’ 
by E.A.J. Honigmann.
Manchester, 172 pp., £17.50, April 1985, 0 7190 1743 2
Show More
Show More
... an institution, a body of texts whose study, from O-level to the highest reaches of academia, is a means of legitimating social advancement and whose production on the stage and on television makes a powerful contribution to Britain’s invisible exports. This ‘Shakespeare’ has the characteristics Roland Barthes ascribes to myth: it turns history into ...

Enjoying every moment

David Reynolds: Ole Man Churchill, 7 August 2003

Churchill 
by John Keegan.
Weidenfeld, 181 pp., £14.99, November 2002, 0 297 60776 6
Show More
Man of the Century: Winston Churchill and His Legend since 1945 
by John Ramsden.
HarperCollins, 652 pp., £9.99, September 2003, 0 00 653099 0
Show More
Clementine Churchill: The Revised and Updated Biography 
by Mary Soames.
Doubleday, 621 pp., £25, September 2002, 0 385 60446 7
Show More
Churchill at War 1940-45 
by Lord Moran.
Constable, 383 pp., £9.99, October 2002, 1 84119 608 8
Show More
Churchill’s Cold War: The Politics of Personal Diplomacy 
by Klaus Larres.
Yale, 583 pp., £25, June 2002, 0 300 09438 8
Show More
Show More
... War – more than two million words, if you choose to include the indexes (and he did). By no means all these words were Churchill’s – many came from his research assistants and more than a few from the Cabinet Secretary Norman Brook, who vetted the volumes for the Government and paraphrased sensitive passages. The composition and impact of the ...

Counter-Counter-Revolution

David Runciman: 1979, 26 September 2013

Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century 
by Christian Caryl.
Basic, 407 pp., £19.99, June 2013, 978 0 465 01838 3
Show More
Show More
... and the Paris Peace Conference, which ensured that the triumph would be squandered. What this means is that it was the dénouement of the First World War that changed everything: a messy, sprawling, disorderly event that spilled out across all attempts to contain it. Its momentous qualities cannot be made to fit into the timeframe defined by a single ...

Are we there yet?

David Simpson: Abasing language, abusing prisoners, 17 February 2005

Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror 
by Mark Danner.
Granta, 573 pp., £16.99, February 2005, 9781862077720
Show More
The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib 
edited by Karen Greenberg and Joshua Dratel.
Cambridge, 1284 pp., £27.50, February 2005, 0 521 85324 9
Show More
Show More
... torture has been generic rather than exceptional in all branches of the military. This is by no means an exclusively American problem: stories from Deepcut barracks in England suggest that if no foreign enemy is at hand then proxies can be created. The confidential Red Cross report on Guantanamo, details of which became public at the end of November, stated ...

Open Book

Nicholas Spice, 4 September 1986

A Simple Story 
by S.Y. Agnon, translated by Hillel Halkin.
246 pp., £13.10, March 1986, 0 8052 3999 5
Show More
At the Handles of the Lock: Themes in the Fiction of S.Y. Agnon 
by David Aberbach.
Oxford, 221 pp., £18, November 1984, 0 19 710040 6
Show More
Snakewrist 
by Christopher Burns.
Cape, 240 pp., £9.95, July 1986, 0 224 02351 9
Show More
Show More
... to Palestine, where a year later he published his first story, signing it Agnon, which in Hebrew means ‘cut off’. In 1924 he adopted Agnon as his name, and, as S.Y. Agnon, came to be considered a patriarch of modern Hebrew literature. He died in 1970, four years after winning the Nobel Prize. In the wake of this success, between 1966 and 1970, Gollancz ...

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