Search Results

Advanced Search

31 to 45 of 105 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Book Reviewing

Stefan Collini: On the ‘TLS’, 5 November 2020

... to a concerted marketing campaign, had fallen back to around 32,000.Having left his very visible mark, Abell moved on (to a senior role at the new Times Radio) in June this year, and Martin Ivens, former editor of the Sunday Times, was installed in his place. But it would appear that the paper is suffering from long-term health problems. Alan Jenkins, the ...

A Broken Teacup

Amanda Claybaugh: The ambition of William Dean Howells, 6 October 2005

William Dean Howells: A Writer’s Life 
by Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson.
California, 519 pp., £22.95, May 2005, 0 520 23896 6
Show More
Show More
... deal to further the careers of two young writers who became his closest friends, Henry James and Mark Twain. He published much of their early fiction and reviewed them in other magazines. He opened the Atlantic to Southern writers in the aftermath of the Civil War; and at Harper’s, where his power was even greater if less direct, he promoted women ...

What to Tell the Axe-Man

Jeremy Waldron: Hypocrisy and Mendacity, 6 January 2011

Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power, from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond 
by David Runciman.
Princeton, 272 pp., £13.95, September 2010, 978 0 691 14815 1
Show More
Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics 
by Martin Jay.
Virginia, 241 pp., $24.95, April 2010, 978 0 8139 2972 9
Show More
Show More
... York in 2008 after it was revealed that he was using a call-girl when he went to Washington, or Mark Sanford, governor of South Carolina, who got into trouble when his aides discovered that he was really visiting a divorcée in Buenos Aires when he said he was hiking in the Appalachians – a lot of people say that it’s not the cheating or the fornication ...

Where a man can be a man

Margaret Anne Doody, 16 December 1993

All the Pretty Horses 
by Cormac McCarthy.
Picador, 302 pp., £5.99, November 1993, 0 330 33169 8
Show More
Show More
... something to Steinbeck. At a few blessed moments, however, there are some lighter reminiscences of Mark Twain:   My daddy run off from home when he was 15. Otherwise I’d of been born in Alabama.   You wouldnt of been born at all ...   I dont see why you say that. I’d of been born somewheres.   How?   Well why not?   If your mama ...

When Chicago Went Classical

Andrew Saint: A serial killer and the World’s Fair, 1 April 2004

Devil in the White City 
by Erik Larson.
Bantam, 496 pp., £7.99, April 2004, 0 553 81353 6
Show More
Show More
... the Greek had said the same thing of semitic Carthage two thousand years ago.’ By contrast, when Mark Twain came visiting, he fell ill, stayed in his hotel for 11 days and left Chicago without seeing the fair. Maybe it was all too refined for him. Not that Burnham and his colleagues expected or wanted to refine American robustness and ingenuity out of ...

Friends

Eugene Goodheart, 16 March 1989

The company we keep: An Ethics of Fiction 
by Wayne Booth.
California, 485 pp., $29.55, November 1988, 0 520 06203 5
Show More
Show More
... remembers with more than a twinge of conscience that he and his colleagues found the challenge to Mark Twain’s great novel offensive because it violated ‘academic norms of objectivity’. Anyone teaching literature and writing criticism nowadays knows that the appeal to objectivity will no longer do. Indeed, any such appeal may even be suspected ...

Never the twain

Mark Amory, 4 March 1982

Evelyn Waugh, Writer 
by Robert Murray Davis.
Pilgrim Books, 342 pp., $20.95, May 1981, 0 937664 00 6
Show More
Show More
... with the scene at Forest Lawn’ came ‘The Anglo-American impasse. Never the twain shall meet.’ Not a new thought even thirty years ago, but, though we may run into one another occasionally in the corridors of the Humanity Research Center of the University of Texas (their territory), or share a train compartment on the way to Combe ...

Minnesota Fates

Ferdinand Mount, 12 October 1989

We Are Still Married 
by Garrison Keillor.
Faber, 330 pp., £11.99, September 1989, 0 571 14140 4
Show More
Show More
... born in the 1830 and 1840s: Bret Harte, Artemus Ward, Joel Chandler Harris and, lion among them, Mark Twain. With O. Henry, born a decade later, we are already moving out of the oral tradition, with its loose-limbed jogtrot rhythms and its shameless delight in red herrings and shaggy dogs, its weakness for pratfalls and confidence tricks, and beginning ...

Americans

Stephen Fender, 2 July 1981

The Life of John O’Hara 
by Frank MacShane.
Cape, 274 pp., £10, March 1981, 9780224018852
Show More
Show More
... film scripts that had gone wooden. To be a journalist meant, as it did for Defoe, Dickens and Mark Twain, going for the salient external markers of a human dilemma, ‘telling a story’, getting your copy in on time, and becoming accustomed to living by your writing without fellowships or chairs of creative writing. To break with the New Yorker ...

On Mike Davis

T.J. Clark, 17 November 2022

... in London, on the board of the New Left Review. It was definitely a funny story, but told with a Mark Twain, Yankee at the Court of King Arthur generosity. And of course I understood his laughter at my love of the Southland. I had the feeling that somewhere in the back of his mind, listening to me, was the memory of a scene in a movie called Model ...

Clan Gatherings

Inigo Thomas: The Bushes, 24 April 2008

The Bush Tragedy: The Unmaking of a President 
by Jacob Weisberg.
Bloomsbury, 271 pp., £16.99, February 2008, 978 0 7475 9394 2
Show More
Show More
... with the Wind and Dallas, both hugely popular dynastic stories, were largely about Southern clans. Mark Twain had a theory about that: he said the fondness for clans was a consequence of a Southern addiction to Walter Scott. He was only half-joking when he said that Scott’s heroic clans, and their readiness for battle, were responsible for the Civil ...

Her Boy

R.W. Johnson: Mark Thatcher, 16 November 2006

Thatcher’s Fortunes: The Life and Times of Mark Thatcher 
by Mark Hollingsworth and Paul Halloran.
Mainstream, 415 pp., £7.99, July 2006, 1 84596 118 8
Show More
The Wonga Coup: The British Mercenary Plot to Seize Oil Billions in Africa 
by Adam Roberts.
Profile, 304 pp., £9.99, June 2006, 1 86197 934 7
Show More
Show More
... a terrible relentlessness about Thatcher’s Fortunes, a chronicle that can be easily summed up. Mark Thatcher, talentless, and so graceless that the most charming thing about him was that he would sometimes introduce himself as ‘charmless Mark’, was – is – doted on by ‘Mummy’, in whose eyes he could do no ...

Hoping to Hurt

Paul Smith, 9 February 1995

The Cultivation of Hatred 
by Peter Gay.
HarperCollins, 685 pp., £25, April 1994, 0 00 255218 3
Show More
Show More
... three quotations that stand as epigraph to this book are from Büchner, the Goncourt brothers and Mark Twain, taking over the baton from Byron, Tchaikovsky and Flaubert in the previous volume. How far the thinking, writing, chattering, teaching and preaching classes who dominate the scene spoke for or to their less intellectual and vocal fellows ...

Smokejumpers

Chauncey Loomis, 10 March 1994

Young Men and Fire 
by Norman Maclean.
Chicago, 301 pp., £8.75, October 1993, 0 226 50062 4
Show More
Show More
... very end his attempt ‘to follow the young men to their crosses’, the cement markers put up to mark the places of their deaths, although he anticipates it early in the book: If a storyteller thinks enough of storytelling to regard it as a calling, unlike a historian he cannot turn from the suffering of his characters. A storyteller, unlike a ...

Uses for Horsehair

David Blackbourn, 9 February 1995

Duelling: The Cult of Honour in Fin-de-Siècle Germany 
by Kevin McAleer.
Princeton, 268 pp., £19.95, January 1995, 0 691 03462 1
Show More
Show More
... reasons. One is the role played by a distinctively German institution, the student duel or Mensur. Mark Twain and Jerome K. Jerome were among the foreigners who described this blood-drenched ritual with horrified fascination. Few students actually duelled: Catholics refused on principle, and there was never any question of extending the dubious privilege ...

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