London Review of Books

A Minor Irritant to the French Authorities

Fred Halliday, 20 February 1997

Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power
by David Marr.
California, 602 pp., $50, October 1995, 0 520 07833 0Show More

“... fought over territories of the past half-century. The war for Vietnam’s independence from France ended in the 1954 Geneva Accords. Then came the war with the US, which reached its height after the commitment of American ground troops in 1965 and ended in the capture of the South by Communist forces in 1975. Yet this postcolonial history, and the ...”

Chef de Codage

Brian Rotman: Codes, 15 July 1999

Between Silk and Cyanide: The Story of SOE’s Code War
by Leo Marks.
HarperCollins, 614 pp., £19.99, November 1998, 0 00 255944 7Show More

“... general and composed of independent units – one for each occupied country except France, which had two, one for de Gaulle’s Free French and another for those loyal to Giraud – each recruiting and running its own partisans, SOE was an intelligence professional’s bad dream. June 1942: enter young Leo Marks. Having failed to convince the ...”

Homage to Rabelais

M.A. Screech, 20 September 1984

“... both the thirsty Dipsodes and the obscure Amaurotes. In Gargantua he fits the rivalries between France and the Holy Roman Empire into the tiny world of castle, wood and ford which could be seen from the windows of his childhood home at La Devinière. (It still can.) His wars are like children’s games: he delighted in games, while seeing most of them as ...”

Bordragings

John Kerrigan: Scotland’s Erasure, 10 October 2024

England’s Insular Imagining: The Elizabethan Erasure of Scotland
by Lorna Hutson.
Cambridge, 323 pp., £30, November 2023, 978 1 009 25357 4Show More

“... designed first to pre-empt a marriage that would strengthen Scotland’s ‘auld alliance’ with France and second to neutralise the north while Henry’s war against France was prosecuted. In the event, his military campaign failed, though it’s possible that he did succeed in laying some foundations during the wars of ...”

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 ...”

Just a smack at Grigson

Denis Donoghue, 7 March 1985

Montaigne’s Tower, and Other Poems
by Geoffrey Grigson.
Secker, 72 pp., £5.95, October 1984, 0 436 18806 6Show More

Collected Poems: 1963-1980
by Geoffrey Grigson.
Allison and Busby, 256 pp., £4.95, October 1984, 0 85031 557 3Show More

The Faber Book of Reflective Verse
edited by Geoffrey Grigson.
Faber, 238 pp., £7.95, October 1984, 0 571 13299 5Show More

Blessings, Kicks and Curses
by Geoffrey Grigson.
Allison and Busby, 279 pp., £4.95, October 1984, 0 85031 558 1Show More

The Private Art: A Poetry Notebook
by Geoffrey Grigson.
Allison and Busby, 231 pp., £4.95, October 1984, 9780850315592Show More

Before the Romantics: An Anthology of the Enlightenment
by Geoffrey Grigson.
Salamander, 349 pp., £5.95, September 1984, 0 907540 59 7Show More

“... turtledoves, bullfinches, owls, Thomas Moore’s ‘Thee, Thee, Only Thee’ and much that France still offers. There are writers he likes, most of them dead: Ronsard, John Clare, William Barnes (‘love of whose poems seems to me a litmus paper of the genuine’), Auden (‘the greatest of my contemporaries’), George ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

Show more articles

More search Options

Browse by Subject