Search Results

Advanced Search

31 to 45 of 113 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Propaganda of the Deed

Steve Fraser: Emma Goldman, 26 February 2009

Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years Vol I: Made for America, 1890-1901 
edited by Candace Falk.
Illinois, 659 pp., $35, August 2008, 978 0 252 07541 4
Show More
Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years Vol. II: Making Speech Free, 1902-1909 
edited by Candace Falk.
Illinois, 641 pp., £35, August 2008, 978 0 252 07543 8
Show More
Show More
... court injunctions and hurling makeshift weapons at advancing militiamen from behind barricades. George Pullman was so sure that labour insurgents would desecrate his corpse that he left instructions for his lead-lined casket to be covered with tar paper and asphalt and deposited in a vault made of concrete and reinforced steel. Small conspiratorial ...

Hot Dogs

Malcolm Bull, 14 June 1990

Mine eyes have seen the glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America 
by Randall Balmer.
Oxford, 246 pp., $19.95, September 1989, 0 19 505117 3
Show More
In God’s Country: Travels in the Bible Belt, USA 
by Douglas Kennedy.
Unwin Hyman, 240 pp., £12.95, November 1989, 0 04 440423 9
Show More
The Divine Supermarket 
by Malise Ruthven.
Chatto, 336 pp., £14.95, August 1989, 0 7011 3151 9
Show More
The Democratisation of American Christianity 
by Nathan Hatch.
Yale, 312 pp., £22.50, November 1989, 0 300 44470 2
Show More
Religion and 20th-Century American Intellectual Life 
edited by Michael Lacey.
Cambridge/Woodrow Wilson Centre for Scholars, 214 pp., £27.50, November 1989, 0 521 37560 6
Show More
New Religions and the Theological Imagination in America 
by Mary Farrell Bednarowski.
Indiana, 175 pp., $25, November 1989, 0 253 31137 3
Show More
Show More
... memorials to Brigham Young, Martin Luther King and Thomas Merton, and ends at the grave of Thomas Jefferson – has a distinctly antiquarian flavour. Ruthven believes that myths ‘become plausible when canonised by arts that penetrate the collective cultural psyche’, and he seems happier visiting monuments than talking to people more credulous than himself ...

Antidote to Marx

Colin Kidd: Oh, I know Locke!, 4 January 2024

America’s Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life 
by Claire Rydell Arcenas.
Chicago, 265 pp., $25, October, 978 0 226 82933 3
Show More
Show More
... about contract and consent as broadly typical of English constitutional doctrine. It’s true that Jefferson knew his Locke, but the Declaration of Independence doesn’t straightforwardly reiterate Lockean arguments. Its commitment to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ sounds like a tweak on Locke’s formulation that political society was ...

Along the Voie Sacrée

Inigo Thomas, 8 November 2018

... advance that began in September 1918 and ended with the signing of the Armistice on 11 November. George Marshall, after whom the Marshall Plan is named, drew up the order of battle for the American Expeditionary Force. More than a million American soldiers fought in what is known as the Hundred Days Offensive: 122,000 were injured; 26,000 were killed. The ...

Blessed, Beastly Place

Douglas Dunn, 5 March 1981

Precipitous City 
by Trevor Royle.
Mainstream, 210 pp., £6.95, May 1980, 0 906391 09 1
Show More
RLS: A Life Study 
by Jenni Calder.
Hamish Hamilton, 362 pp., £9.95, June 1980, 0 241 10374 6
Show More
Gillespie 
by J. MacDougall Hay.
Canongate, 450 pp., £4.95, November 1979, 0 903937 79 4
Show More
Scottish Satirical Verse 
edited by Edwin Morgan.
Carcanet, 236 pp., £6.95, June 1980, 0 85635 183 0
Show More
Collected Poems 
by Robert Garioch.
Carcanet, 208 pp., £3.95, July 1980, 0 85635 316 7
Show More
Show More
... he expanded and elucidated Virgil, his translation left nothing out. Royle is right to mention Sir George MacKenzie of Rosehaugh as ‘one of the few intellectual giants of his day’ – ‘that noble wit of Scotland’, as Dryden called him – but he might have told us that his Aretina (1660) was the first novel by a Scotsman (and he mght have mentioned Sir ...

The Monster Plot

Thomas Powers: James Angleton, Spymaster, 10 May 2018

The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton 
by Jefferson Morley.
Scribe, 336 pp., £20, December 2017, 978 1 911344 73 5
Show More
Show More
... years, was not the ideal spy. The ideal spy is a mouse-coloured blur in the crowd, someone like George Smiley, described by his wife as ‘breathtakingly ordinary’. There was nothing ordinary about Angleton. Once experienced, his history, his appearance, his manner, and his stubborn refusal to be clear were all indelible. I spent an afternoon with him ...

Absent Framers

Andreas Teuber, 31 March 1988

... in my power, to avoid becoming the draughtsman of papers to be reviewed by a public body’. Jefferson did not exhibit the same self-knowledge and when he complained to Franklin during the course of the debate over the Declaration of Independence about the ‘degradations’ and ‘mutilations’ of his draft, Franklin was reminded of an incident from ...

Fine Chances

Michael Wood, 5 June 1986

Literary Criticism 
by Henry James, edited by Leon Edel.
Cambridge, 1500 pp., £30, July 1985, 0 521 30100 9
Show More
Henry James: The Writer and his Work 
by Tony Tanner.
Massachusetts, 142 pp., £16.95, November 1985, 0 87023 492 7
Show More
Show More
... edition of which these volumes form a part. How does he look, posing for posterity alongside Poe, Jefferson, Melville, Mark Twain, Jack London, Harriet Beecher Stowe and others? Is he smiling at some of the company he is keeping; frowning momentarily at the presence of Whitman, who at first he thought was not a poet but a man merely ‘bullied by the ...

Everybody’s Friend

D.A.N. Jones, 15 July 1982

William Cobbett: The Poor Man’s Friend 
by George Spater.
Cambridge, 318 pp., £15, March 1982, 0 521 22216 8
Show More
Show More
... Political Register came out almost every week from 1802 until his death in 1835. According to George Spater, this once powerful paper is now largely forgotten ‘except by historians who occasionally take a hasty glance here and there into its vast bulk of some 42,000 pages’. The existence of that bulk represents part of the difficulty in writing a ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘A Serious Man’, 17 December 2009

A Serious Man 
directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen.
November 2009
Show More
Show More
... seem to pass. The receptionist says: ‘He’s thinking.’ The second sage, Rabbi Nachtner (George Wyner), nearly steals the movie, because of his air of infinite if never tested wisdom, and his grand indifference to anything other than the sound of his own beautifully modulated voice. He seeks to help Larry by telling him a story, the central version ...

Diary

David Bromwich: The Establishment President, 13 May 2010

... The right to offshore drilling for oil, which Democrats had held back for eight years under George W. Bush, was granted by Obama without a word of contest. The coal industry, too, doubtless will be accommodated as a prelude to cap-and-trade bargaining, but the recent mining disaster in West Virginia has rendered an early statement inadvisable. Once ...

Hating

Patrice Higonnet, 14 November 1996

Benjamin Franklin and his Enemies 
by Robert Middlekauf.
California, 276 pp., £19.95, March 1996, 0 520 20268 6
Show More
Show More
... if brought up to revere him in Public School, USA. Abraham Lincoln is the father of his people; George Washington, of his nation; but Benjamin Franklin – as it happens, a basically very decent man – hovers over the entire tradition of American ‘Babbittry’. Some subterranean but essential link runs from Poor Richard to Disneyland, Mozart on the muzak ...

Washed White

Michael Rogin, 10 June 1993

The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America 
by Sacvan Bercovitch.
Routledge, 424 pp., £40, November 1992, 9780415900140
Show More
Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America 
by Garry Wills.
Simon and Schuster, 315 pp., £17.99, April 1993, 0 671 76956 1
Show More
Show More
... survived the death of Puritanism. Carrying along nationalist historians like the Jacksonian George Bancroft, American Renaissance writers such as Hawthorne and Melville, and political leaders like Lincoln, the sacralisation of the United States created ‘the single most cohesive culture in the modern world’. Americans share not a common middle-class ...

Crop Masters

Daniel Aaron, 19 January 1989

Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of the Revolution 
by T.H. Breen.
Princeton, 216 pp., $9.95, February 1988, 0 691 04729 4
Show More
Show More
... Some hoped to become solvent by moving to fresh lands in the Piedmont. Others, like George Washington, switched from tobacco to wheat, thereby transforming themselves from ‘planters’ to ‘farmers’. ‘New crops generated new symbols,’ as Breen observes, and although wheat, Virginia’s second staple by the 1770s, did not displace ...

Diary

Frank Kermode: American Books, 1 April 1983

... one to come. Parkman’s two volumes will appear in the autumn, along with the collected works of Jefferson in one volume, one of four Henry Adams volumes, and one of four Emersons. James will fill eight volumes, and the first, soon to appear, includes Watch and Ward and four other early works. His critical writing will occupy two volumes, which will be not ...

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