Search Results

Advanced Search

31 to 45 of 48 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Diary

Alan Bennett: Bennett’s Dissection, 1 January 2009

... at all. And today, 15 June, comes George Bush paying a courtesy call on the Queen and Gordon Brown before having a cheering conscience-free get-together with his old mate Tony Blair. And here are the helicopters flying over Regent’s Park to prove it. 26 June, Espiessac. I sit in the wicker rocking-chair in the shade of the willow by the pool. Except ...

Birditis

Ian Penman: The Obsession with Charlie Parker, 23 January 2014

Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker 
by Gary Giddins.
Minnesota, revised edition, 195 pp., £15, October 2013, 978 0 8166 9041 1
Show More
Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker 
by Stanley Crouch.
Harper, 365 pp., £20, September 2013, 978 0 06 200559 5
Show More
Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker 
by Chuck Haddix.
Illinois, 188 pp., £20, September 2013, 978 0 252 03791 7
Show More
Show More
... Charlie Parker (c.1950). Benny Carter, Barney Kessell, Flip Phillips, Charlie Shavers, Ray Brown, Charlie Parker, Oscar Peterson, J.C. Heard, Ben Webster and Johnny Hodges at a Clef recording session, Hollywood (1952). Charlie Parker at the Clef recording session (1952). Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker at Massey Hall, Toronto (1953). Charlie Parker ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... friends saying: ‘This is going to be the best Ramadan yet.’ Next door, Manchester United fan Gary Maunders, a 57-year-old father of four who lived in the area, was spending the evening with Deborah Lamprell, who worked at Holland Park Opera. Yasin El Wahabi went to the mosque to say the prayer that would close his fast. His sister Nur Huda was ...

In the Box

Dale Peck, 6 February 1997

How Stella Got Her Groove Back 
by Terry McMillan.
Viking, 368 pp., £16, September 1996, 0 670 86990 2
Show More
Push 
by Sapphire.
Secker, 142 pp., £7.99, September 1996, 0 436 20291 3
Show More
The Autobiography of My Mother 
by Jamaica Kincaid.
Vintage, 228 pp., £8.99, September 1996, 0 09 973841 4
Show More
Show More
... of the first half of this decade, writers as diverse in talent and sensibility as Rebecca Brown, Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, Gary Indiana and Sarah Schulman, writers whose main similarity seemed to be that they all started out at small presses before being ‘discovered’ by big houses.By now – by which I ...

The Comeuppance Button

Colin Burrow: Dreadful Mr Dahl, 15 December 2022

Teller of the Unexpected: The Life of Roald Dahl, an Unofficial Biography 
by Matthew Dennison.
Head of Zeus, 264 pp., £20, August 2022, 978 1 78854 941 7
Show More
Show More
... he married one. Patricia Neal, co-star with Ronald Reagan in The Hasty Heart and former lover of Gary Cooper, was infinitely glamorous and their marriage was more or less instantly unhappy, since Neal wanted to be a movie star and Dahl wanted to be more than a movie star’s husband. Moreover, he wanted someone to cook him his lunch.Over these years he met ...
... open pavilion eight hundred steel columns hang from rope-like rods, all the same powdery reddish-brown rusty colour as the shackles in the slavery statue. Each of them bears the names of those murdered in one of eight hundred counties. Outside, eight hundred coffin-like replicas of the columns lie on the ground as if they held the remains of victims of a ...

Bizarre and Wonderful

Wes Enzinna: Murray Bookchin, Eco-Anarchist, 4 May 2017

Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin 
by Janet Biehl.
Oxford, 344 pp., £22.99, October 2015, 978 0 19 934248 8
Show More
Show More
... and Ursula LeGuin (who based her novel The Dispossessed in part on Bookchin’s early work); but Gary Snyder denounced him as a ‘thug’, the Situationists dismissed him as ‘spit in the horrible communitarian soup’ and one of his former acolytes, David Watson, wrote a book, Beyond Bookchin, ridiculing him. Bookchin replied to Öcalan that he was too ...

Move like a party

Mendez: George Michael’s Destiny, 5 January 2023

George Michael: A Life 
by James Gavin.
Abrams, 502 pp., £25, June 2023, 978 1 4197 4794 6
Show More
George Michael: Freedom Uncut 
directed by David Austin and George Michael.
Show More
Show More
... York cabaret’, should exercise greater care. (Incidentally, no context is given when he mentions Gary Glitter and Jonathan King, both of whom were later found guilty of sexually abusing minors.)Wham! signed off with a show at Wembley in 1986. By then, Prince was the paradigm. In ‘I Would Die 4 U’ he sang ‘I’m not a woman, I’m not a man/I am ...

Loafing with the Sissies

Colm Tóibín: The Trials of Andy Warhol, 10 September 2020

Warhol: A Life as Art 
by Blake Gopnik.
Allen Lane, 931 pp., £35, March, 978 0 241 00338 1
Show More
Show More
... writes, ‘changed their windows once a week … and crowds of gawkers gathered to watch the brown paper come down to reveal the next batch of displays.’ Warhol, it was written, ‘is able to create with equal skill and imagination anything from an industrial advertisement to a fashion page to a window display’.He also liked penises. ‘Andy had this ...

Driving through a Postcard

Christian Lorentzen: In New Hampshire, 3 March 2016

... of the Trump Links golf course, the name spelled out in giant letters of grey bricks set into the brown grass. It was a Tuesday morning, and we were on the way to see Donald Trump address an arena full of New Hampshire residents at Great Bay Community College on the outskirts of Portsmouth. On the radio the former Colorado senator and disgraced 1984 ...

Cardenio’s Ghost

Charles Nicholl: The Bits Shakespeare Wrote, 2 December 2010

The Arden Shakespeare: Double Falsehood 
edited by Brean Hammond.
Arden Shakespeare, 443 pp., £16.99, March 2010, 978 1 903436 77 6
Show More
Show More
... into the 18th century. Nor, unfortunately, is it likely to turn up now, though a pair of post-Dan Brown novels – J.C. Carrell’s The Shakespeare Secret and Jean Rae Baxter’s Looking for Cardenio – have turned on this possibility, and there has also been an unconvincing attempt by Charles Hamilton to prove that it survives as the anonymous playscript ...

A Common Assault

Alan Bennett: In Italy, 4 November 2004

... some special territory? Had there been a football match? Were we being punished for the skills of Gary Lineker? As we run, I feel a heavy blow on the top of my head, the blow struck with a short length of steel scaffolding which Rupert sees the fair-haired youth pick up from the ground. Fortunately, the scaffolding doesn’t come instantly to hand, and he has ...

Do I like it?

Terry Castle: Outsider Art, 28 July 2011

... spoken or responded to language again), he drew constantly, producing large, hypnotic images on brown paper bags or donated rolls of examining-table paper of the type you see in doctors’ surgeries. His characteristic subjects include arid Mexican landscapes and hills (often with train tunnels and trains coming through them), horse-riders, deer and ...

My Heroin Christmas

Terry Castle: Art Pepper and Me, 18 December 2003

... check) and a gorgeous pale tweed sports jacket, dotted with tiny delicate flecks of brown and black. He held his alto gently in the crook of one arm. He smiled faintly at me – a low-rent Lucifer – and was humming quietly. You’d be so – o – o – o – nice – to come home to! He reminded me at once of those hunky young hard-drinking ...

‘That’s my tank on fire’

James Meek: Video War, 13 April 2023

... not that long ago. The filming marine is breathing heavily. He climbs out of the trench into a brown winter wood where every branch has been snapped and torn by bullets and shrapnel. Later, he will upload this to the internet.There is a terrible, bleak genre of video in which soldiers at the threshold of death film themselves; a kind of farewell message to ...

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