Search Results

Advanced Search

31 to 37 of 37 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Singer’s Last Word

John Bayley, 24 October 1991

Scum 
by Isaac Bashevis Singer, translated by Rosaline Dukalsky Schwartz.
Cape, 224 pp., £13.99, October 1991, 0 224 03200 3
Show More
Show More
... for a people to write about itself can be both inspiration and good business. It certainly was for Isaac Bashevis Singer. His incomparable sense of Polish Jewry, the Yiddishness in which he was brought up, renders itself to the reader as if in the palpable form of experience: the words seem to sit us down and bring us beer and brandy with a side order of ...

I tooke a bodkine

Jonathan Rée: Esoteric Newton, 10 October 2013

Newton and the Origin of Civilisation 
by Jed Buchwald and Mordechai Feingold.
Princeton, 528 pp., £34.95, October 2012, 978 0 691 15478 7
Show More
Show More
... The life of Isaac Newton falls into two halves, and the main problem for Newton studies is how to fit them together. In the first half he was a sulky Cambridge mathematician who, at the age of 44, astonished the world with a work of natural science that was soon recognised as one of the greatest books ever written ...

A Difficult Space to Live

Jenny Turner: Stuart Hall’s Legacies, 3 November 2022

Selected Writings on Marxism 
by Stuart Hall, edited by Gregor McLennan.
Duke, 380 pp., £25.99, April 2021, 978 1 4780 0034 1
Show More
Selected Writings on Race and Difference 
by Stuart Hall, edited by Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore.
Duke, 472 pp., £27.99, April 2021, 978 1 4780 1166 8
Show More
Show More
... been to become a poet. He did some literary writing: a creole version of King Lear, a Henry James-Isaac Babel hybrid and an epic a bit like Lord Jim, but was unable ‘to find my own voice’. ‘I didn’t really get the deep structures of Englishness … its reservations, ironies and ambiguities, its silences and evasions. I didn’t understand how the ...

Not to Be Read without Shuddering

Adam Smyth: The Atheist’s Bible, 20 February 2014

The Atheist’s Bible: The Most Dangerous Book That Never Existed 
by Georges Minois, translated by Lys Ann Weiss.
Chicago, 249 pp., £21, October 2012, 978 0 226 53029 1
Show More
Show More
... isn’t yet able to realise. Borges’s short fiction is teeming with them. In ‘The Library of Babel’, Borges imagines a library ‘composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries’. The library is ‘total’: it contains books composed of ‘all possible combinations’ of letters: ‘All that is able to be expressed, in ...

Chastened

Lorna Tracy, 3 September 1981

The Habit of Being: Letters by Flannery O’Connor 
edited by Sally Fitzgerald.
Farrar, Straus/Faber, 639 pp., £8.25, January 1979, 0 571 12017 2
Show More
The violent bear it away 
by Flannery O’Connor.
Faber, 226 pp., £2.95, September 1980, 0 571 12017 2
Show More
A good man is hard to find 
by Flannery O’Connor.
Women’s Press, 251 pp., £7.50, May 1980, 0 7043 2832 1
Show More
Show More
... God, we say, for the devil. O’Connor’s stories are neither as brief nor as lyrical as many of Isaac Babel’s are, but they have as much concentrated time in them, and both writers press their readers towards responses as complex as the stories themselves are. With Babel, an immeasurably greater writer, she shared ...

Like Beavers

Wyatt Mason: Safran Foer’s survival stories, 2 June 2005

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close 
by Jonathan Safran Foer.
Hamish Hamilton, 320 pp., £14.99, June 2005, 9780241142134
Show More
Show More
... Conjunctions ran a series of reproductions of pages from a pocket diary that had belonged to Isaac Bashevis Singer. In capital letters, Singer – who emigrated from Poland to America in 1935 – filled page after page with lists of words: 15 JULY: SILT, IMPINGE, OVERLAP, WIREPULLER. 24 JULY: DOCILITY, CEREBRATIONS, INSIDIOUS, AFTERMATH. 29 ...

Our Slaves Are Black

Nicholas Guyatt: Theories of Slavery, 4 October 2007

Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World 
by David Brion Davis.
Oxford, 440 pp., £17.99, May 2006, 0 19 514073 7
Show More
The Trader, the Owner, the Slave 
by James Walvin.
Cape, 297 pp., £17.99, March 2007, 978 0 224 06144 5
Show More
The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000 
by Colin Kidd.
Cambridge, 309 pp., £16.99, September 2006, 0 521 79324 6
Show More
The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview 
by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese.
Cambridge, 828 pp., £18.99, December 2005, 0 521 85065 7
Show More
Show More
... in 1774 that God created racial differences when he scattered the peoples who built the Tower of Babel. A more venerable and influential rationale was drawn from the ninth book of Genesis. As the floodwaters around Mount Ararat were receding, Noah whiled away an afternoon drinking wine from his vineyard. After resolving to sleep off his stupor, he was ...

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