Search Results

Advanced Search

496 to 510 of 878 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Blighted Plain

Jonathan Meades: Wiltshire’s Multitudes, 6 January 2022

The Buildings of England: Wiltshire 
by Julian Orbach, Nikolaus Pevsner and Bridget Cherry.
Yale, 828 pp., £45, June 2021, 978 0 300 25120 3
Show More
Show More
... and, nearby, in the middle of an estate of executive period homes with three-SUV garages, a vast green pantiled Chinese fantasy which houses the Hongxin Oriental Buffet – all you can eat for £12. It’s a more raucous performance than I.M. Pei’s arty pavilion for the Keswick family at Oare, south of Marlborough. There are commendable extensions to the ...

Imps and Ogres

Marina Warner, 6 June 2019

Big and Small: A Cultural History of Extraordinary Bodies 
by Lynne Vallone.
Yale, 339 pp., £20, November 2017, 978 0 300 22886 1
Show More
Show More
... and folk tales are clumsy and blundering and foolish, and their strength doesn’t always prevail: David fells Goliath with a slingshot (like a child in a bombsite playground), and poor boy Jack can outwit the ogre at the top of the beanstalk, however big and strong and vicious and rich he is, and make off with the golden goose. Such stories are popular ...

Going Electric

Patrick McGuinness: J.H. Prynne, 7 September 2000

Poems 
by J.H. Prynne.
Bloodaxe/Folio/Fremantle Arts Centre, 440 pp., £25, March 2000, 1 85224 491 7
Show More
Pearls that Were 
by J.H. Prynne.
Equipage, 28 pp., £4, March 1999, 1 900968 95 9
Show More
Triodes 
by J.H. Prynne.
Barque, 42 pp., £4, December 1999, 9781903488010
Show More
Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970 
edited by Richard Caddel and Peter Quartermain.
Wesleyan, 280 pp., $45, March 1999, 0 8195 2241 4
Show More
Show More
... its grip on the population: real people, slipping off the face of that lovely ground, leaving the green – pleasant lands of Northumberland to be nearer the belly – catch scraps with the shit we set out so grudgingly on plates for the blind to eat in gratitude. What makes poetry like this so inhospitable is, ironically, its radical ...

Because It’s Ugly

Jonathan Rosen: Double-Crested Cormorants, 9 October 2014

The Double-Crested Cormorant: Plight of a Feathered Pariah 
by Linda Wires.
Yale, 349 pp., £20, June 2014, 978 0 300 18711 3
Show More
Show More
... as a monochrome bird is myopic; as Wires points out, its black feathers have hints of blue, green and copper. It’s possible that the birds, which can probably detect the ultraviolet spectrum, see something very different when they look at one another. Wires may be right to invoke the biblical notion of uncleanness, though not for the reason she ...

Diary

Rachel Kushner: Bad Captains, 22 January 2015

... into which the Medusa was sailing were ominously warm. The captain did not take note. The sea went green, and crew members worried. The captain did not. Sand scrolled in the waves. Floating cities of kelp appeared: trouble, crew members knew. The sea went clear: they were screwed. The Medusa ran aground on the treacherous Arguin Bank. Chaos ensued. The captain ...

Mr and Mrs Hopper

Gail Levin: How the Tate gets Edward Hopper wrong, 24 June 2004

Edward Hopper 
edited by Sheena Wagstaff.
Tate Gallery, 256 pp., £29.99, May 2004, 1 85437 533 4
Show More
Show More
... progress of her husband’s major paintings. Nivison’s impact on Hopper was discussed in Vivien Green Fryd’s book Art and the Crisis of Marriage: Georgia O’Keeffe and Edward Hopper (2003), which shows just how significant dysfunctional marriage was for Hopper’s art. The new Hopper exhibition at Tate Modern until 5 September seems determined to write ...

Diary

John Sutherland: My Grandmother the Thief, 21 August 2003

... and powerful friends. She had been a celebrity on What’s My Line? and lives on as the subject of David Bowie’s song ‘God Knows I’m Good’. God knows what the authorities would do to a hardened, inarticulate sneak thief from the lower classes. And even if the magistrates were in a forgiving mood, what about the shame? My grandmother had neither a lucid ...

A Terrible Bad Cold

John Sutherland, 27 September 1990

Dickens 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 1195 pp., £19.95, September 1990, 1 85619 000 5
Show More
Show More
... not an academic, thinks otherwise. His life of Dickens opens with the great man dead, lying on the green sofa in the dining-room of Gad’s Hill Place. But Ackroyd does not regard his subject across any fence: he knows Dickens as intimately as the man knew himself; better, perhaps, since Dickens was not great on self-knowledge. There are no lost keys, no ...

Self-Made Women

John Sutherland, 11 July 1991

The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present 
edited by Virginia Blain, Isobel Grundy and Patricia Clements.
Batsford, 1231 pp., £35, August 1990, 0 7134 5848 8
Show More
The Presence of the Present: Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel 
by Richard Altick.
Ohio State, 854 pp., $45, March 1991, 0 8142 0518 6
Show More
Show More
... Detective Novel, the Companion tells us, was pioneered by women (Metta Victor and Anna Katharine Green) ‘before Conan Doyle’. The entry on the Novel is similarly chauvinistic: ‘Recent scholarship has confirmed that women took the lead among the earliest novelists.’ One could mock this as being like preglasnost history of science, in which Russia ...

Staying in power

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 7 January 1988

Mrs Thatcher’s Revolution: The Ending of the Socialist Era 
by Peter Jenkins.
Cape, 411 pp., £12.95, November 1988, 0 224 02516 3
Show More
De-Industrialisation and Foreign Trade 
by R.E. Rowthorn and J.R. Wells.
Cambridge, 422 pp., £40, November 1988, 0 521 26360 3
Show More
Show More
... and ‘incentives’ were introduced to get spending down. None of these had much effect. A Green Paper in 1986 conceded an at best ‘modest success’. It proposed the Community Charge, which a White Paper in 1983 had declared ‘unworkable’. But by then, many local authorities were having to account creatively and borrow from abroad. To the ...

Manchester’s Moment

Boyd Hilton, 20 August 1998

Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846-1946 
by Anthony Howe.
Oxford, 336 pp., £45, December 1997, 9780198201465
Show More
The Origins of War Prevention: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1730-1854 
by Martin Ceadel.
Oxford, 587 pp., £55, December 1996, 0 19 822674 8
Show More
Show More
... but because Eden’s actions were sensed to be duplicitous and therefore a blot on England’s sea-green incorruptibility. If militarism and realpolitik have disguised themselves in a blanket of duty, the alternative liberal-pacifist tradition has been equally riddled with ambiguities. In theory, Cobden’s Englishman was economic man, attending solely to his ...

Cultivating Cultivation

John Mullan: English culture, 18 June 1998

The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the 18th Century 
by John Brewer.
HarperCollins, 448 pp., £19.99, January 1997, 0 00 255537 9
Show More
Show More
... effectively to create a special sense of kingship’. There was to be a grand firework display in Green Park, accompanied by Handel’s specially commissioned Music for the Royal Fireworks. Lacking the expertise to stage the spectacle, courtiers turned to Tyers, who lent his advice and staff on one condition: that he be allowed to hold a ‘rehearsal’ of ...

What! Not you too?

Richard Taws: I was Poil de carotte, 4 August 2022

Journal 1887-1910 
by Jules Renard, translated by Theo Cuffe.
Riverrun, 381 pp., £20, October 2020, 978 1 78747 559 5
Show More
Show More
... But the rest he can take or leave. In May 1902, he visits the Louvre and is unimpressed by David and Velázquez. He mistakes Chardin’s eggs for onions. ‘Nothing here means anything to me.’ As he leaves the museum he sees a blackbird, poised against a wall of green, which eclipses all the paintings he has ...

Awful but Cheerful

Gillian White: The Tentativeness of Elizabeth Bishop, 25 May 2006

Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts and Fragments 
by Elizabeth Bishop, edited by Alice Quinn.
Farrar, Straus, 367 pp., £22.50, March 2006, 0 374 14645 4
Show More
Show More
... 1956 for her second, A Cold Spring. Writing to Robert Lowell in 1958, she confesses to feeling ‘green with envy’ over Lowell’s ‘kind of assurance’ in the poems of Life Studies, and adds that ‘it is hell to realise one has wasted half one’s talent through timidity.’ Bishop’s ‘timidity’ is part of the reason why, at the time of her ...

It’ll all be over one day

James Meek: Our Man in Guantánamo, 8 June 2006

Enemy Combatant: A British Muslim’s Journey to Guantánamo and Back 
by Moazzam Begg and Victoria Brittain.
Free Press, 395 pp., £18.99, February 2006, 0 7432 8567 0
Show More
Show More
... anyone, doesn’t appear to have fought in any jihad and doesn’t have an Oxford degree. He has a green belt in jujitsu and a blue belt in Taekwondo, acquired in classes in his native Birmingham, and speaks English, Urdu and Arabic, along with some Pashto and a little Bosnian. What the Americans got when they captured him was a small ...

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