Search Results

Advanced Search

406 to 420 of 817 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

No Bottle

Rose George: Water, 18 December 2014

Drinking Water: A History 
by James Salzman.
Overlook Duckworth, 320 pp., £9.99, October 2013, 978 0 7156 4528 4
Show More
Parched City: A History of London’s Public and Private Drinking Water 
by Emma Jones.
Zero Books, 361 pp., £17.99, June 2013, 978 1 78099 158 0
Show More
Water 4.0: The Past, Present and Future of the World’s Most Vital Resource 
by David Sedlak.
Yale, 352 pp., £20, March 2014, 978 0 300 17649 0
Show More
Show More
... beautiful, a small glimpse of Granada in the middle of West Yorkshire, though it was nothing more grand than a warehouse. And he wasn’t content with providing just one water spout for visitors to Roundhay Park: his circular fountain has eight. Four on the outside walls, four on the inside. What munificence! Today, not one of the spouts works. Park users are ...

High Taxes, Bad Times

John Pemble: Late Georgian Westminster, 10 June 2010

The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1820-32 
by D.R. Fisher.
Cambridge, 6336 pp., £490, December 2009, 978 0 521 19314 6
Show More
Show More
... and ministries were made and unmade. Furthermore, during this period the House of Commons was the Grand Inquest not just of the Nation, but of nations. Having taken over the affairs of Scotland in 1707 and of Ireland in 1801, it now arbitrated the affairs of Europe and oversaw a global empire. Members were voting on issues as diverse as juries in New South ...

Make them go away

Neal Ascherson: Grossman’s Failure, 3 February 2011

To the End of the Land 
by David Grossman, translated by Jessica Cohen.
Cape, 577 pp., £18.99, September 2010, 978 0 224 08999 9
Show More
Show More
... back in 1959 and first published in 1980. A comparison between the two books, Vasily’s and David’s, does not do the later one much good. As an outpouring of feeling, and as a series of sombre representations of the condition of modern Israel, To the End of the Land is often impressive, sometimes touching. As a novel it simply does not come off. This ...

I’m ready for you!

Raymond N. MacKenzie: Balzac’s Places, 23 January 2025

Balzac’s Paris: The City as Human Comedy 
by Éric Hazan, translated by David Fernbach.
Verso, 20 pp., £15.99, June 2024, 978 1 83976 725 8
Show More
The Lily in the Valley 
by Honoré de Balzac, translated by Peter Bush.
NYRB, 263 pp., £16.99, July 2024, 978 1 68137 798 8
Show More
Show More
... Hazan’s book is thick with quotations from Balzac’s novels and stories. The translator, David Fernbach, had to decide how to handle them: translate them himself, or seek out existing versions? Understandably, he adopted the latter course, but in some cases he chooses Katherine Prescott Wormeley’s translations from the late 19th century, which are ...

Diary

Gaby Wood: How to Draw an Albatross, 18 June 2020

... image is trapped inside the prism. No one around you can see it – it’s almost a hallucination. David Hockney, who took up drawing with a modern camera lucida in 1999, described it in Secret Knowledge (2001) as projecting not ‘a real image of the subject, but an illusion of one in the eye’:At first I found the camera lucida very difficult to use ...

Beach Scenes

Gavin Millar, 1 August 1985

A Man with a Camera 
by Nestor Almendros, translated by Rachel Phillips Belash.
Faber, 306 pp., £9.95, June 1985, 0 571 13589 7
Show More
Players of Shakespeare: Essays in Shakespearian Performance by 12 Players with the Royal Shakespeare Company 
edited by Philip Brockbank.
Cambridge, 179 pp., £12.50, June 1985, 0 521 24428 5
Show More
Year of the King 
by Anthony Sher.
Chatto, 208 pp., £10.95, June 1985, 0 7011 2926 3
Show More
Show More
... reminder that the RSC’s standards have always been based on a close study of the words. David Suchet convincingly shows that his human rather than fishy, black but not monstrous Caliban was a perfectly logical reading, in defiance of grand and inhuman Calibans stretching back to Beerbohm Tree, who, taking his name ...

Booker Books

Frank Kermode, 22 November 1979

... shortlisted authors are expected to rise during the period of suspense that ends just before the grand dinner at Stationers’ Hall; the winner gets an extra bonus of more sales; and the sponsors presumably do at least as well out of the enterprise as they would by spending the same amount of cash on cricket or golf. Although Booker has a financial stake in ...

Paintings about Painting

Nicholas Penny, 4 August 1983

The Art of Describing 
by Svetlana Alpers.
Murray, 273 pp., £25, May 1983, 0 7195 4063 1
Show More
Show More
... its dust-jacket) there is a good colour illustration of a self-portrait and still-life painted by David Bailly of Leiden in 1651. A young artist (is it too ingenious to suggest that it represents Bailly himself as a young man?) holds Bailly’s portrait on a table where a wide variety of other works of art appear together with a candle, a skull, an hourglass ...

Blighted Plain

Jonathan Meades: Wiltshire’s Multitudes, 6 January 2022

The Buildings of England: Wiltshire 
by Julian Orbach, Nikolaus Pevsner and Bridget Cherry.
Yale, 828 pp., £45, June 2021, 978 0 300 25120 3
Show More
Show More
... of streets, eliminating, inter alia, many early 19th-century cottages, Victorian terraces and a grand 15th-century house that was home to the Swan School. For years a ‘road to nowhere’ (in fact to an unbuilt car park) stood on piloti above the surviving houses. A succession of streets ends incoherently in blind walls and service roads. Completeness is ...

Biting Habits

Hugh Pennington: The Zika Virus, 18 February 2016

... reported case of human infection with the Zika virus was in 1964. Another Entebbe virologist, David Simpson, had a 36-hour fever, some back pain, a headache and a rash. Three days later he had recovered apart from some spots. For many years the Zika virus was thought to be unimportant. There was no evidence to suggest that it could do anything more than ...

Flip-flopping

Emily Wilson: Can heroes hesitate and still be heroic?, 17 November 2005

Hesitant Heroes: Private Inhibitions, Cultural Crisis 
by Theodore Ziolkowski.
Cornell, 163 pp., £17.50, March 2004, 0 8014 4203 6
Show More
Show More
... a move away from ‘pure blood vengeance’ to democracy, politics and law. Ziolkowski’s grand comparative idea involves lots of details with which readers may disagree, and many questions remain unanswered. One central issue that deserves more discussion is whether the title is an oxymoron. Can heroes hesitate and still be heroic? Is there any ...

In Pursuit of an Heiress

Nicholas Penny: Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, 16 June 2016

Letters of a Dead Man 
by Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, edited and translated by Linda Parshall.
Dumbarton Oaks, 753 pp., £55.95, May 2016, 978 0 88402 411 8
Show More
Show More
... it is elevated to a sublime combination of nature and architecture, as if painted by Caspar David Friedrich, or by Pückler’s friend Friedrich Schinkel, then the leading architect in Berlin: standing in that allée of ivy-clad columns … you see them recede in perspective until they come together three hundred feet ahead of you, terminating in a ...

Diary

John Sutherland: My Grandmother the Thief, 21 August 2003

... and powerful friends. She had been a celebrity on What’s My Line? and lives on as the subject of David Bowie’s song ‘God Knows I’m Good’. God knows what the authorities would do to a hardened, inarticulate sneak thief from the lower classes. And even if the magistrates were in a forgiving mood, what about the shame? My grandmother had neither a lucid ...

Warfare State

Thomas Meaney, 5 November 2020

The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities 
by John J. Mearsheimer.
Yale, 320 pp., £20, November 2018, 978 0 300 23419 0
Show More
Republic in Peril: American Empire and the Liberal Tradition 
by David Hendrickson.
Oxford, 304 pp., £25.49, December 2017, 978 0 19 066038 3
Show More
Show More
... it, and their prescriptions range from an immediate moratorium on military interventions to a ‘grand strategy for the many’ that seeks to direct US power to eco-socialist ends. But another powerful set of critiques of ‘muscular liberal internationalism’ have come from an older cadre of conservatives. John Mearsheimer and ...

Diary

Patricia Lockwood: Saving a Life, 16 February 2023

... right words, I will never know, because he knows what I do not, how to keep things to himself. David Sedaris had invited me to read alongside him that night at UCLA, but before that we had the whole day. We took a cab first to Venice Beach, so that Jason could pay homage to Arnold Schwarzenegger. ‘Remember when he says that he feels the pump and it’s ...

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