Search Results

Advanced Search

31 to 45 of 51 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Angry or Evil?

Michael Wood: Brecht’s Poems, 21 March 2019

The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht 
translated by Tom Kuhn and David Constantine.
Norton, 1286 pp., £35, December 2018, 978 0 87140 767 2
Show More
Show More
... various attempts at repair fail and the ship limps back to Hamburg – it has to be towed from Holland – and is scrapped. The last words of the poem are       Any child, we thought Could see that our wages had Really been too niggardly. Kuhn and Constantine tell us that ‘less than half of [Brecht’s] output of poems was published by the time of ...

Fugitive Crusoe

Tom Paulin: Daniel Defoe, 19 July 2001

Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions 
by Maximilian Novak.
Oxford, 756 pp., £30, April 2001, 0 19 812686 7
Show More
Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe 
edited by W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank.
Pickering & Chatto, £595, December 2000, 1 85196 465 7
Show More
Show More
... British or English culture, Hull occupies a special, if seldom visited position, as a gateway to Holland and Protestant Europe, as well as to the high seas. Or in Larkin’s version of Yeats’s version of Milton, Hull is a lonely tower, vigilant and visionary. Defoe, it must be recognised, is one of the most influential architects of the British national ...

Jolly Bad Luck

P.N. Furbank, 24 March 1994

Letters from a Peruvian Woman 
by Françoisc de Graffigny, translated by David Kornacker.
Modern Language Association, 174 pp., £5.95, January 1994, 9780873527781
Show More
Show More
... invades her bedroom, declaring in terrifying tones that he is lost, he will have to flee to Holland, his life is in Graffigny’s hands: if she cannot retrieve the hundred copies of his poem, which he is sure are now circulating in Lunéville, he is a dead man. Soon Mme du Châtelet joins him in the room, brandishing the fatal letter and accusing the ...

Dummy and Biffy

Noël Annan, 17 October 1985

Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community 
by Christopher Andrew.
Heinemann, 616 pp., £12.95, October 1985, 0 434 02110 5
Show More
The Secret Generation 
by John Gardner.
Heinemann, 453 pp., £9.95, August 1985, 0 434 28250 2
Show More
Two Thyrds 
by Bertie Denham.
Ross Anderson Publications, 292 pp., £7.95, September 1983, 0 86360 006 9
Show More
The Ultimate Enemy: British Intelligence and Nazi Germany 1933-1939 
by Wesley Wark.
Tauris, 304 pp., £19.50, October 1985, 1 85043 014 4
Show More
Show More
... the cryptography centre at Bletchley. Meanwhile Cumming had established MI6 and was finding that Holland was a good deal more hospitable to spies than Switzerland. Other ways of gathering intelligence came into use, such as aerial reconnaissance and pigeons, and in the Second World War enemy agents were not shot but turned into double agents, the master of ...

Lights On and Away We Go

Keith Thomas: Happy Thoughts, 20 May 2021

The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1790 
by Ritchie Robertson.
Allen Lane, 984 pp., £40, November 2020, 978 0 241 00482 1
Show More
Show More
... light which spreads itself over the world, especially in those two free nations of England and Holland, upon whom the affairs of Europe now turn; and if Heaven sends us a peace soon … it is impossible but letters and knowledge must advance in greater proportion than ever.’ Peace was still seven years off, but Shaftesbury’s ‘mighty light’ would ...

Field of Bones

Charles Nicholl: The last journey of Thomas Coryate, the English fakir and legstretcher, 2 September 1999

... of genuine local pride and because the name accorded so well with his own celebrated oddity: ‘Tom of Odcombe, that odd jovial author,’ Jonson calls him. After schooling at Winchester he went up to Oxford, where he ‘attained to admirable fluency in the Greek tongue’ but left without taking a degree. What we know of the Elizabethan Coryate is ...

Unmistakable

Michael Rogin, 20 August 1998

Celebrity Caricature in America 
by Wendy Wick Reaves.
Yale, 320 pp., £29.95, April 1998, 0 300 07463 8
Show More
Show More
... find being made a public spectacle so delicious, and it is remarkable that he sent William Holland to Newgate for issuing the pamphlets of Tom Paine, but not for publishing Richard Newton’s scandalous political caricatures. Newton, a brilliant cartoonist who died at the age of 21, is the subject of an exhibition ...

Illustrating America

Peter Campbell, 21 March 1985

Willem de Kooning: Drawings, Paintings, Sculpture 
by Paul Cummings, Jorn Merkert and Claire Stoullig.
Norton, 308 pp., £35, August 1984, 0 393 01840 7
Show More
Abstract Expressionist Painting in America 
by William Seitz.
Harvard, 490 pp., £59.95, February 1984, 0 674 00215 6
Show More
About Rothko 
by Dore Ashton.
Oxford, 225 pp., £15, August 1984, 0 19 503348 5
Show More
The Art of the City: Views and Versions of New York 
by Peter Conrad.
Oxford, 329 pp., £15, June 1984, 0 19 503408 2
Show More
Show More
... where it was becoming commercially successful. The city which had brought together de Kooning from Holland, Rothko from Russia and Oregon, Hoffman from Germany, Gorky from Russia, would now take its profit. The magazines, the newspapers, the galleries, the curators, the collectors, the critics, the whole network by which reputations are made, was in gear. The ...

Priapus Knight

Marilyn Butler, 18 March 1982

The Arrogant Connoisseur: Richard Payne Knight 1751-1824 
edited by Michael Clarke and Nicholas Penny.
Manchester, 189 pp., £30, February 1982, 0 7190 0871 9
Show More
Show More
... For the next decade or so, intellectual polemicists like Volney and Dupuis; Erasmus Darwin and Tom Paine promoted the notion that in this respect Christianity was originally like other religions and so no better than it should be. Hamilton led the way by writing a letter to Sir Joseph Banks, the Secretary of the Dilettanti, in which he described the ...

How bad can it get?

LRB Contributors: On Johnson’s Britain, 15 August 2019

... Neal Ascherson, Mary Beard, Jonathan Coe, Tom Crewe, William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody allies!”’ The writer A ...

The Divisions of Cyprus

Perry Anderson, 24 April 2008

... mixture of times: post-dated in emergence, pre-dated in form. Pan-hellenism was in many ways, as Tom Nairn pointed out long ago, ‘the original European model of successful nationalist mobilisation’, producing in the Greek Wars of independence the first victorious movement of national liberation after the Congress of Vienna. Yet, he went on, ‘the very ...

Jewish Liberation

David Katz, 6 October 1983

The Jewish Community in British Politics 
by Geoffrey Alderman.
Oxford, 218 pp., £17.50, March 1983, 9780198274360
Show More
Economic History of the Jews in England 
by Harold Pollins.
Associated University Presses, 339 pp., £20, March 1983, 0 8386 3033 2
Show More
Show More
... London’ in the Augustan Age, who came to London free of charge on the British mail packet from Holland to Harwich. Like the gentile poor, they often became involved in crime: the ‘Chelsea Murders’ of 1771 committed by a gang of eight Jews provides the earliest example of the use of publicity to capture criminals. At least one thousand Jews were ...

Suspicious

Tariq Ali: Richard Sorge’s Fate, 21 November 2019

An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent 
by Owen Matthews.
Bloomsbury, 448 pp., £25, March 2019, 978 1 4088 5778 6
Show More
Show More
... called him the ‘most formidable spy in history’; other admirers included John le Carré, Tom Clancy and General MacArthur. Owen Matthews – whose new biography of Sorge is the fifth to appear in English – is well qualified to write this book: his Ukrainian maternal grandfather was Boris Bibikov, a factory worker in Kharkov who became head of the ...

A Feeling for Ice

Jenny Diski, 2 January 1997

... a watery division was astonishing to me. When I was very small we went to Belgium and drove to Holland one day. I couldn’t credit the unreality of it. It was the sea that said a country was a country, not an official checking passports at a border. And where were we, I wanted to know, when the car was half-way across the line dividing Belgium and ...

Brideshead and the Tower Blocks

Patrick Wright, 2 June 1988

Home: A Short History of an Idea 
by Witold Rybczynski.
Heinemann, 256 pp., £12.95, March 1988, 0 434 14292 1
Show More
Show More
... Rybczynski deplores the damage done by the ‘socialist post-war governments in England, Germany, Holland and the Scandinavian countries’ which responded favourably to the ‘left-leaning rhetoric of the Modern school’. But before this momentary engagement with the question of public housing disrupts his art-historical survey, he quickly jumps back into ...

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