Search Results

Advanced Search

436 to 450 of 1485 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Updike’s Innocence

Craig Raine, 25 January 1990

Just Looking: Essays on Art 
by John Updike.
Deutsch, 210 pp., £19.95, November 1989, 0 233 98501 8
Show More
Show More
... Dramatists, contains a passage germane here: ‘A play of Shakespeare’s and a play of Henry Arthur Jones’s are essentially of the same type, the difference being that Shakespeare is very much greater and Mr Jones very much more skilful.’ This explains a lot when Updike criticises Degas’s ‘unevenness of rendering’: the woman’s dress in ...

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
... statements about his work suggest he intended. They were particularly well received in England – Henry Moore spoke of them as his ‘most revelatory experience in modern painting since his youthful discovery of Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, and the Cubists’. This quick response in England may have owed something to our familiarity with the cloudy sublimities ...

In Praise of Spiders

Caleb Crain: Wilkie Collins’s Name Games, 11 September 2008

The Woman in White 
by Wilkie Collins.
Vintage, 609 pp., £5.99, October 2007, 978 0 09 951124 3
Show More
Show More
... salad days, he sputters about her ‘shameless depravity’ and ‘atrocious perversity’. When Henry James complained of the novel’s ‘general ponderosity’, he may have had Walter partly in mind. By contrast, nothing is lost on Walter’s enemy, Isidor Ottavio Baldassare Fosco, count of the Holy Roman Empire. The name is false, which may be why ...

I’m ready for you!

Raymond N. MacKenzie: Balzac’s Places, 23 January 2025

Balzac’s Paris: The City as Human Comedy 
by Éric Hazan, translated by David Fernbach.
Verso, 20 pp., £15.99, June 2024, 978 1 83976 725 8
Show More
The Lily in the Valley 
by Honoré de Balzac, translated by Peter Bush.
NYRB, 263 pp., £16.99, July 2024, 978 1 68137 798 8
Show More
Show More
... humaine.) Balzac’s significance in the history of the novel was fully apparent by 1905, when Henry James said that his ‘achievement remains one of the most inscrutable, one of the unfathomable, final facts in the history of art’. Of course, not all Balzac’s contemporaries agreed on the quality of the work; some complained that his prose was ...

At the Shore

Inigo Thomas, 30 August 2018

... only pebble on the beach’ was the title of a 19th-century song that has become a saying. ‘Dear Henry,’ William James wrote to his physician friend Henry Bowditch, ‘you see that you are not the only pebble on the beach, or toad in the puddle of senile degeneration.’ ‘What is a ...

Societies

Perry Anderson, 6 July 1989

A Treatise on Social Theory. Vol. II: Substantive Social Theory 
by W.G. Runciman.
Cambridge, 493 pp., £35, February 1989, 0 521 24959 7
Show More
Show More
... of the social sciences have the confidence to invoke the ideals of Herbert Spencer and Henry James simultaneously. In his second volume, Runciman proceeds to his own substantive social theory. He remarks at the outset that he will here be concerned only with the explanatory segment of his overall prescriptions. But this involves no shrinkage ...

In the Egosphere

Adam Mars-Jones: The Plot against Roth, 23 January 2014

Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books 
by Claudia Roth Pierpont.
Cape, 353 pp., £25, January 2014, 978 0 224 09903 5
Show More
Show More
... process gave him a model for ‘reckless narrative disclosure’ of a sort very far removed from Henry James. He doesn’t go into detail in The Facts, but Roth Unbound provides some disconcerting background information about the talking cure as it worked in this particular case. His analyst was Hans Kleinschmidt, an émigré German Jew who fled the ...

Keeping up with the novelists

John Bayley, 20 June 1985

Unholy Pleasure: The Idea of Social Class 
by P.N. Furbank.
Oxford, 154 pp., £9.50, June 1985, 0 19 215955 0
Show More
Show More
... who had all the confidence of the class without giving a damn about belonging to it. Oddly enough, Henry James was in the same position because, as Ralph Touchett says, ‘being an American here, you don’t belong to any class.’ The Portrait of a Lady is not about a lady in the English sense, but about a specimen of a particular sort of American ...

Post-Paranoid

Michael Wood: Underworld by Don Delillo, 5 February 1998

Underworld 
by Don DeLillo.
Picador, 832 pp., £10, February 1998, 0 330 36995 4
Show More
Show More
... way everyone would if they had a writer lurking in their consciousness, just as characters in late Henry James speak not as their real-life equivalents might but as they themselves have to if they are to stretch their own emotional and intellectual possibilities as far as they will go. In James the money and the social ...

Is R2-D2 a person?

Galen Strawson, 18 June 2015

Staying Alive: Personal Identity, Practical Concerns and the Unity of a Life 
by Marya Schechtman.
Oxford, 214 pp., £35, March 2014, 978 0 19 968487 8
Show More
Show More
... that ‘this isn’t the person I married,’ and one doesn’t need to be unwell to feel what Henry James felt, writing to Rhoda Broughton in November 1915 after she had praised one of (what he called) his ‘old perpetrations’: ‘I think of it, the masterpiece in question, as the work of quite another person than myself, at this date – that of ...

Plonking

Ferdinand Mount: Edward Heath, 22 July 2010

Edward Heath 
by Philip Ziegler.
Harper, 654 pp., £25, June 2010, 978 0 00 724740 0
Show More
Show More
... the women minded it more), then it must have been as obscure as the hurt allegedly suffered by Henry James, since nobody so far has convincingly explained it. Ted’s father and grandfather were convivial, easygoing men, rooted in their native Kent, fond of a drink and ready to pinch any passing bottom. On his 80th birthday, Heath père, who had ...

Johnny Weissmuller dead in Acapulco

Clive James, 1 March 1984

... spit-smooth, headlong, creek-around-a-rock trough Carved by his features. He had six wives like Henry VIII but don’t laugh, Because Henry VIII couldn’t swim a stroke And if you ever want to see a true king you should watch Weissmuller In Tarzan Escapes cavorting underwater with Boy In the clear river with networks of ...

An Infinity of Novels

Philip Horne, 14 September 1989

A Short Guide to the World Novel: From Myth to Modernism 
by Gilbert Phelps.
Routledge, 397 pp., £30, September 1988, 0 415 00765 8
Show More
The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction 
by John Sutherland.
Longman, 696 pp., £35, March 1989, 0 582 49040 5
Show More
The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875-1914 
by Peter Keating.
Secker, 533 pp., £30, September 1989, 0 436 23248 0
Show More
Show More
... of decent emotion and decent understatement, derived perhaps from Trollope’s favourite Henry Esmond (which Sutherland has edited), is not infrequent in the Companion, for there are many comparably harrowing stories to be evoked: This was the period of the Irish famine and Mrs Bell Martin ... devoted herself to the relief of her father’s ...

Lotti’s Leap

Penelope Fitzgerald, 1 July 1982

Collected Poems and Prose 
by Charlotte Mew, edited by Val Warner.
Carcanet/Virago, 445 pp., £9.95, October 1981, 0 85635 260 8
Show More
Show More
... knew the unpleasant secrets of the Mews’ new home at 9 Gordon Street. By 1888 the eldest son, Henry, and the youngest daughter, Freda, were both incurably insane. Both had to be confined, Henry with his own nurse in Peckham Hospital, Freda in the Carisbrooke Mental Home on the Isle of Wight, the town which Charlotte ...

By All Possible Art

Tobias Gregory: George Herbert, 18 December 2014

Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert 
by John Drury.
Penguin, 396 pp., £9.99, April 2014, 978 0 14 104340 1
Show More
Show More
... will all be going to hell. That’ll answer them. Herbert has influenced poets from Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw to Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill. And not only poets; reading Herbert has made converts, even in modern times. While reciting ‘Love (III)’, the famous last poem in The Temple, Simone Weil felt that ‘Christ himself ...

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