London Review of Books

An English Vice

Bernard Bergonzi, 21 February 1985

The Turning Key: Autobiography and the Subjective Impulse since 1800
by Jerome Hamilton Buckley.
Harvard, 191 pp., £12.75, April 1984, 0 674 91330 2Show More

The Art of Autobiography in 19th and 20th-Century England
by A.O.J. Cockshut.
Yale, 222 pp., £10.95, September 1984, 0 300 03235 8Show More

“... a word of English origin referring to a kind of writing commonly practised in England but rare in France. Buckley is more interested in the ‘subjective impulse’ as a cultural phenomenon, reflecting a great increase in self-consciousness in society, than in autobiography as a distinctive literary form. He therefore casts his net widely, taking in ...”

Uncrownable King and Queen

Christopher Sykes, 7 February 1980

The Windsor Story
by J. Bryan and Charles Murphy.
Granada, 602 pp., £8.95, November 1980, 0 246 11323 5Show More

“... his to her. In his last year of life, he paid a moving tribute to her to his old American friend David Bruce. He was a doomed man. In spite of his enormous youthful popularity, he was ill-fitted to be a King or President or Head of State of any kind. His inner confidence was early and fatally corroded by ceaseless bullying from his martinet father, George ...”

Common Ground

Edmund Leach, 19 September 1985

A Social History of Western Europe 1450-1720: Tensions and Solidarities among Rural People
by Sheldon Watts.
Hutchinson, 275 pp., £7.95, October 1984, 0 09 156081 0Show More

Kinship in the Past: An Anthropology of European Family Life 1500-1900
by Andrejs Plakans.
Blackwell, 276 pp., £24.50, September 1984, 0 631 13066 7Show More

Interests and Emotion: Essays on the Study of Family and Kinship
edited by Hans Medick and David Warren Sabean.
Cambridge, 417 pp., £35, June 1984, 0 521 24969 4Show More

“... anthropologists to emphasise the existence of common ground between their two disciplines. In France this has been especially marked among historians such as Le Roy Ladurie who are associated with the periodical Annales. The response from the social anthropologists has been patchy; there has been much programmatic talk about the relevance of history for ...”

Potatoes and Point

Angela Carter, 22 May 1986

The History and Social Influence of the Potato
by Redcliffe Salaman, edited by J.G. Hawkes.
Cambridge, 729 pp., £35, November 1985, 0 521 07783 4Show More

“... place on Good Friday. The new vegetable soon acquired a good deal of old folklore. At Epinal, in France: ‘The woman who carries home the last sheaf, or the last basket of potatoes, is known throughout the year as the “corn” or “potato dog”.’ It must be the relative newness of the potato that makes the ‘potato dog’ seem a little ...”

Rainy Days

Gabriele Annan, 18 September 1997

The File on H
by Ismail Kadare, translated by David Bellos.
Harvill, 169 pp., £8.99, June 1997, 9781860462573Show More

“... provenance and political correctness. Which also explains why Ismail Kadare is big in Italy and France (where he has lived in semi-self-imposed exile since 1990. The blurb says that he now divides his time between Paris and Tirana). Besides, it is unfair to judge his work in double translation: the English versions of his novels have been translated from ...”

At Kettle’s Yard

Eleanor Birne: The Reopening, 22 March 2018

“... He knew all about beautiful interiors. He had made sure to have his own in Morocco and France; and while working at the Tate in the 1920s and early 1930s, he and his wife, Helen, had lived in Hampstead, where Braque, Naum Gabo, Diaghilev and Nijinksky were among their many visitors – along with artist friends from closer to home, particularly Ben ...”

Tied to the Mast

Adam Mars-Jones: Alan Hollinghurst, 19 October 2017

The Sparsholt Affair
by Alan Hollinghurst.
Picador, 454 pp., £20, October 2017, 978 1 4472 0821 1Show More

“... may say, of the obsession that one of his friends, Evert Dax, conceives for the splendidly built David Sparsholt, ‘I struggled slightly to understand it,’ but there’s no element of disapproval. Dax even asks why he’s so sympathetic, and he replies: ‘So much of that sort of thing went on at school it would seem very odd to me if it suddenly stopped ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... whether successful or not – will undoubtedly further nurture autonomy movements in Spain, France, Italy and elsewhere, and this will have implications not just for the economy and governance, but also for Nato. In the UK itself the referendum is also about much more than Scotland. On an extended visit to Edinburgh last month, I was struck by how many ...”

A General Logic of Crisis

Adam Tooze, 5 January 2017

How Will Capitalism End?
by Wolfgang Streeck.
Verso, 262 pp., £16.99, November 2016, 978 1 78478 401 0Show More

“... we know that in 2012 the political fallout was only just beginning. It was in December 2011 that David Cameron reopened the European question by opting out of the new ‘fiscal compact’ drawn up by Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy with the aim of enforcing budget discipline across the EU. In the US in spring 2012, Mitt Romney emerged as the candidate from ...”

Three feet on the ground

Marilyn Butler, 7 July 1983

William Wordsworth: The Borders of Vision
by Jonathan Wordsworth.
Oxford, 496 pp., £25, February 1983, 0 19 812097 4Show More

William Wordsworth: The Poetry of Grandeur and of Tenderness
by David Pirie.
Methuen, 301 pp., £14.95, March 1982, 0 416 31300 0Show More

Benjamin the Waggoner
by William Wordsworth, edited by Paul Betz.
Cornell/Harvester, 356 pp., £40, September 1981, 0 85527 513 8Show More

“... and a commentator on Wordsworth’s oeuvre in its best years, 1797-1805. Another British critic, David Pirie, writes in The Poetry of Grandeur and of Tenderness from a point of view which often resembles Jonathan Wordsworth’s. Pirie’s book is less obviously biographical in its orientation, yet in the end its goal is a portrait of Wordsworth’s mind and ...”

Love of His Life

Rosemarie Bodenheimer: Dickens, 8 July 2010

Charles Dickens
by Michael Slater.
Yale, 696 pp., £25, September 2009, 978 0 300 11207 8Show More

“... how the birth of one of his children may have helped to shape the birth scenes in Oliver Twist or David Copperfield, how his revulsion at Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents fuelled an article attacking the Pre-Raphaelites in general, or just why that Megalosaurus ‘would have been fresh in Dickens’s memory’ as he wrote the remarkable opening ...”

In a Frozen Crouch

Colin Kidd: Democracy’s Ends, 13 September 2018

How Democracy Ends
by David Runciman.
Profile, 249 pp., £14.99, May 2018, 978 1 78125 974 0Show More

Edge of Chaos: Why Democracy Is Failing to Deliver Economic Growth – And How to Fix It
by Dambisa Moyo.
Little, Brown, 296 pp., £20, April 2018, 978 1 4087 1089 0Show More

How Democracies Die
by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.
Viking, 311 pp., £16.99, January 2018, 978 0 241 31798 3Show More

Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy
by William Galston.
Yale, 158 pp., £25, June 2018, 978 0 300 22892 2Show More

“... its constitutional prerogatives). The Trilateral Commission – a discussion group founded by David Rockefeller to bring together policymakers, academics and journalists from North America, Western Europe and Japan – put out a controversial report in 1975 titled The Crisis of Democracy, which argued that an overload of welfare responsibilities was ...”

Go for it, losers

David Trotter: Werner Herzog’s Visions, 30 November 2023

Every Man for Himself and God against All
by Werner Herzog, translated by Michael Hofmann.
Bodley Head, 355 pp., £25, October, 978 1 84792 724 8Show More

“... the patriarch of the family, but not to her husband, Dietrich, who was serving in the army in France (and probably, since he ‘knew how to make himself scarce’, well to its rear). Both men were academics: Rudolf a classics professor turned archaeologist who made significant discoveries on the island of Kos; Dietrich, more ‘pirate’ than professor, a ...”

I met murder on the way

Colin Kidd: Castlereagh, 24 May 2012

Castlereagh: Enlightenment, War and Tyranny
by John Bew.
Quercus, 722 pp., £25, September 2011, 978 0 85738 186 6Show More

“... Unionists as parochial know-nothings. Revisionist historians, most prominently Ian McBride and David Livingstone, have demonstrated that the history of Ulster Presbyterianism from the 18th century is characterised by intellectual richness, an openness to science, a commitment to progress and a taste for theological heterodoxy, notwithstanding backwoods ...”

Bounce off a snap

Hal Foster: Yve-Alain Bois’s Reflections, 30 March 2023

An Oblique Autobiography
by Yve-Alain Bois, edited by Jordan Kantor.
No Place, 375 pp., £15.99, December 2022, 978 1 949484 08 3Show More

“... and the Guggenheim Museum, where he sees a Moholy-Nagy exhibition. On his return to France, Bois gives up his own artmaking, and after a tedious course in Pau he decides against art history too. The siren call now comes from critical theory – the avant-garde of this period. To his surprise Roland Barthes accepts him into his seminar on ...”

Show more articles

More search Options

Browse by Subject