Search Results

Advanced Search

466 to 480 of 740 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

With Fresh Eyes

Diarmaid MacCulloch: Peter Brown’s Achievement, 5 June 2025

Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History 
by Peter Brown.
Princeton, 713 pp., £38, June 2023, 978 0 691 24228 6
Show More
Show More
... class displaced and the consequent disarray of lesser Protestant families in their orbit: ‘the small world of the little big men of the provinces’. Beginning in the 19th century, Irish landed estates were sold off and Protestant political privileges dismantled, a process much accelerated in the 1920s by the War of Independence and subsequent civil ...

Cousinhood

David Cannadine, 27 July 1989

The Social Politics of Anglo-Jewry 1880-1920 
by Eugene Black.
Blackwell, 428 pp., £35, February 1989, 9780631164913
Show More
The Persistence of Prejudice: Anti-Semitism in British Society during the Second World War 
by Tony Kushner.
Manchester, 257 pp., £29.95, March 1989, 0 7190 2896 5
Show More
The Club: The Jews of Modern Britain 
by Stephen Brook.
Constable, 464 pp., £15.95, April 1989, 0 09 467340 3
Show More
Show More
... less than 1 per cent of Britain’s total population. And it has not only been comparatively small, it has also been relatively safe. Unlike Russia or France or Austria or Germany, there have been no pogroms, no show trials, no outbreaks of orchestrated anti-semitism, no final solutions. Ever since Anglo-Jewry’s return to Britain on the eve of the ...

State Theatre

Peter Burke, 22 January 1987

The Rome of Alexander VII: 1655-1667 
by Richard Krautheimer.
Princeton, 199 pp., £16.80, November 1985, 9780691040325
Show More
Firearms and Fortifications: Military Architecture and Siege Warfare in 16th-century Siena 
by Simon Pepper and Nicholas Adams.
Chicago, 245 pp., £21.25, October 1986, 0 226 65534 2
Show More
Show More
... Mario Chigi – which was large enough to be a serious drain on the Papal revenues but too small to be taken seriously by the European powers. On the other hand, despite the losses incurred during the Reformation, the spiritual domains of the Popes remained vast. The Papacy was a power to be reckoned with, however difficult this power was (and is) to ...

When the Mediterranean Was Blue

John Bayley, 23 March 1995

Cyril Connolly: A Nostalgic Life 
by Clive Fisher.
Macmillan, 304 pp., £20, March 1995, 0 333 57813 9
Show More
Show More
... Such Were the Joys; Beaton by singing ‘If you were the only girl in the world’ in a voice ‘small but true’, and with what he also memorably described in A Georgian Boyhood as ‘an unsettling persuasiveness’. Connolly himself was less precocious, but did his best as the all-purpose old-fashioned aesthete. When he and Orwell went on to Eton the ...

Breeding

Frank Kermode, 21 July 1994

The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner 
edited by Claire Harman.
Chatto, 384 pp., £25, June 1994, 0 7011 3659 6
Show More
Sylvia and David: The Townsend Warner/Garnett Letters 
Sinclair-Stevenson, 246 pp., £20, June 1994, 1 85619 341 1Show More
Show More
... Sylvia disliked (‘I went into Valentine’s bedroom before she was up, and my eye fell on a small rosary by her bed, curled up and neat as a snake’) and she caused Warner, notionally quite permissive in such matters, much torment by a protracted and agonised affair with another woman. She was extravagantly loved and when the time came deeply ...

Late Developer

Paul Foot, 22 February 1990

Against the Tide: Diaries 1973-1976 
by Tony Benn.
Hutchinson, 512 pp., £20, October 1989, 0 09 173775 3
Show More
Show More
... now in breaking industry’s resistance to my policies. I shall win over the managers and the small businessmen, and I shall get the nationalised industries to welcome the planning agreements; I shall isolate the big Tory companies, then show how much money they have been getting from the Government, and if they don’t want it, they don’t have to have ...

Inventor

Richard Luckett, 21 December 1989

I.A. Richards: His Life and Work 
by John Paul Russo.
Routledge, 843 pp., £40, May 1989, 0 415 03134 6
Show More
Show More
... a personal friendship which lasted some twenty-two years. But all in all these elements make up a small proportion of the whole, and they depend on the fortuitous availability of material. They cannot be said to construct the dimension of ‘social reality’ that would have provided Russo with the test case for which he had apparently hoped. Here he had bad ...

At the Hop

Sukhdev Sandhu, 20 February 1997

Black England: Life before Emancipation 
by Gretchen Gerzina.
Murray, 244 pp., £19.99, October 1995, 0 7195 5251 6
Show More
Reconstructing the Black Past: Blacks in Britain 1780-1830 
by Norma Myers.
Cass, 162 pp., £27.50, July 1996, 0 7146 4576 1
Show More
Show More
... assertion that the Government was motivated by ‘racism and a certain amount of xenophobia’. As Stephen Braidwood has pointed out in Black Poor and White Philanthropists, it was a voluntary scheme. If London’s black poor were as canny and had community networks as well-established as Gerzina claims, why did they opt for the ‘deadly trap’ of Sierra ...

I am a Cretan

Patrick Parrinder, 21 April 1988

On Modern Authority: The Theory and Condition of Writing, 1500 to the Present Day 
by Thomas Docherty.
Harvester, 310 pp., £25, May 1987, 0 7108 1017 2
Show More
The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, Flaubert 
by Christopher Prendergast.
Cambridge, 288 pp., £27.50, March 1986, 0 521 23789 0
Show More
Show More
... Prendergast, who in 1971 edited the Cambridge structuralist pamphlet ‘Signs of the Times’ with Stephen Heath and Colin MacCabe, might be said to have played a small part in the assault on mimesis. Now he has tentatively and scrupulously set out to rehabilitate it. Plato argued for excluding the poets because he ...

1685

Denis Arnold, 19 September 1985

Interpreting Bach’s ‘Well-Tempered Clavier’: A Performer’s Discourse of Method 
by Ralph Kirkpatrick.
Yale, 132 pp., £14.95, January 1985, 0 300 03058 4
Show More
Bach, Handel, Scarlatti: Tercentenary Essays 
edited by Peter Williams.
Cambridge, 363 pp., £27.50, April 1985, 0 521 25217 2
Show More
Handel: The Man and his Music 
by Jonathan Keates.
Gollancz, 346 pp., £12.95, February 1985, 0 575 03573 0
Show More
Sensibility and English Song: Critical Studies of the Early 20th Century: Vols I and II 
by Stephen Banfield.
Cambridge, 619 pp., £27.50, April 1985, 0 521 23085 3
Show More
Show More
... house. The German states came out of it because of the strength of the court music at a host of small towns: that, and the Kantors at the free cities. The respectability and social worth of the composer-musician is shown in the dynasties – Mozart as well as Bach – which allowed the art to be passed on from one generation to the next. Purcell seems to be ...

Give Pot a Chance

Roy Porter, 8 June 1995

Marihuana: The Forbidden Medicine 
by Lester Grinspoon, edited by James Bakalar.
Yale, 184 pp., £7.95, April 1995, 0 300 05994 9
Show More
Show More
... and Bakalar’s evidence comes from impeccable professional sources. The Harvard biologist, Stephen Jay Gould, is a rare survivor from a generally lethal form of cancer. Chemotherapy induced in him ‘long periods of intense and uncontrollable nausea’ which only smoking joints alleviated. Gould notes that he had never personally approved of ...

Pissing in the Snow

Steven Rose: Dissidents and Scientists, 18 July 2019

Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science 
by Audra J. Wolfe.
Johns Hopkins, 302 pp., £22, January 2019, 978 1 4214 2673 0
Show More
Show More
... in Paris with a CIA agent as its executive secretary and launched Encounter, initially edited by Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol. It attracted a host of leftish public intellectual luminaries as contributors, including Arthur Koestler, who in 1950 inaugurated the CCF at its opening congress in Berlin with a ‘Manifesto for Freedom’. Koestler, along ...

Terkinesque

Sheila Fitzpatrick: A Leninist version of Soviet history, 1 September 2005

The Soviet Century 
by Moshe Lewin, edited by Gregory Elliott.
Verso, 416 pp., £25, February 2005, 1 84467 016 3
Show More
Show More
... or at any rate ignorant – Australian young as exemplars of European experience and its burdens. Small groups of disciples clustered around them, absorbing political philosophy and an eye-witness view of the 20th-century history of Germany, Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union. Charismatic and demanding to the initiated, uncomfortable with outsiders and ...

A Furtive Night’s Work

Michael Dobson: Shakespeare’s working habits, 20 October 2005

1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare 
by James Shapiro.
Faber, 429 pp., £16.99, June 2005, 0 571 21480 0
Show More
Show More
... on the undergraduate-and-general-reader market tapped with such undeserved commercial success by Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare.2 As such it undeniably knocks Greenblatt’s effort, not to mention Peter Ackroyd’s generalising and overlong Shakespeare: The Biography,3 into a cocked jester’s cap. The ploy of ...

Never Mind the Bollocks

Hilary Rose and Steven Rose: Brains and Gender, 28 April 2011

Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences 
by Rebecca Jordan-Young.
Harvard, 394 pp., £25.95, September 2010, 978 0 674 05730 2
Show More
Show More
... were on average 14 per cent heavier than women’s. Broca’s data were elegantly picked apart by Stephen Jay Gould in The Mismeasure of Man. Most of the difference is accounted for by differences in height and build between men and women, and once corrected for these, the gross difference evaporates. After Broca’s death – it turned out at his post-mortem ...

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