Search Results

Advanced Search

46 to 60 of 1123 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

At the Royal Academy

James Davidson: ‘Bronze’, 11 October 2012

... Jasper Johns’s sarcastically monumental cans of beer, the Americans outclassing the dismal and anonymous contributions from modern British sculptors – where’s Barry Flanagan when you need him? Jake and Dinos Chapman? Antony Gormley RA? But as I moved around Room 1, which contains perhaps the most far-flung group of human figures ever gathered in close ...

Loserdom

Thomas Jones: The Novel as Computer Game, 25 September 2008

The Broken World 
by Tim Etchells.
Heinemann, 420 pp., £14.99, July 2008, 978 0 434 01833 8
Show More
Show More
... to them later or simply telling readers to work those bits out for themselves. The narrator, an anonymous young man in an anonymous town somewhere in America, is also endlessly distracted from the game by the even more intractable problems of the rest of his life: his dead-end job manning the phones at a third-rate pizza ...

Not Enjoying Herself

Jenny Diski: Princess Margaret, 16 August 2007

Princess Margaret: A Life Unravelled 
by Tim Heald.
Weidenfeld, 346 pp., £20, July 2007, 978 0 297 84820 2
Show More
Show More
... as well as a couple of former ladies-in-waiting. There were also those who chose to remain anonymous, for all that Heald understands that ‘this can pose problems for outsiders who will think this is a bluff and that no such secret informants actually exist.’ But most of his research was done while being carefully supervised in the Royal Archives in ...
Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky 
by Patrick Hamilton.
Hogarth, 528 pp., £4.95, June 1987, 0 7012 0751 5
Show More
Trust Me 
by John Updike.
Deutsch, 249 pp., £9.95, September 1987, 0 394 55833 2
Show More
Her Story: A Novel 
by Dan Jacobson.
Deutsch, 142 pp., £8.95, August 1987, 0 233 98116 0
Show More
Show More
... The little boy is not Moses, nor is he Jesus, though he might be either, as well as being an anonymous little boy. And that is an image of the way Dan Jacobson has constructed his story – his story being Her Story. It makes a remarkable novel, of a most unusual kind. It shows the unexpectedness and versatility of Jacobson’s powers as a novelist, but ...

Starting over

Malise Ruthven, 9 July 1987

Cities on a Hill 
by Frances FitzGerald.
Picador, 414 pp., £4.50, March 1987, 0 330 29845 3
Show More
Show More
... terms with the outside world mainly as a result of Aids. An initial refusal to face the fact that anonymous ‘high-risk’ sex in Castro’s celebrated bath-houses had greatly facilitated the spread of Aids gave way to a collective decision to acquiesce in their closure. FitzGerald documents this transition, made much more painful by the assassination of ...

Like Oysters in Their Shells

Malcolm Gaskill: The Death Trade, 18 August 2022

All the Living and the Dead: A Personal Investigation into the Death Trade 
by Hayley Campbell.
Raven, 268 pp., £18.99, March, 978 1 5266 0139 1
Show More
Show More
... and disposal of your corpse. Their work is discreet and business-like. By and large, they’re anonymous. Most people in the developed West hide from the reality of death, and those who don’t, those who make a living from it, are hidden from us. Hayley Campbell wants us to peer into this strange world, not least because it’s where we’re all heading ...

Degree of Famousness etc

Peter Howarth: Don Paterson, 21 March 2013

Selected Poems 
by Don Paterson.
Faber, 169 pp., £14.99, May 2012, 978 0 571 28178 7
Show More
Show More
... steadier light, he knows the pure verse, when it finally comes, will sound like a mountain spring, anonymous and serene. Beneath the blue oblivious sky, the water sings of nothing, not your name, not mine. The contradiction between a voice warning you to expect no affirmation from the anonymous calm of pure poetry and the ...

Committee Speak

Robert Alter: Bible Writers, 19 July 2007

Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible 
by Karel van der Toorn.
Harvard, 401 pp., £22.95, March 2007, 978 0 674 02437 3
Show More
Show More
... the term today, and the Greek tragedians, composing their plays for competitions, were scarcely anonymous members of teams of scribes. Another highly competitive literary culture that set a premium on the achievement of the individual author was the Arabic and Hebrew poetry of medieval Spain; from time to time, a poet would even inscribe his signature in ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: Military intelligence, 4 April 2002

... passed by him to the German Embassy.’ Still, ‘Hugessen’s career was a successful one,’ the anonymous obituarist wrote, ‘and he was fortunate in never having had to meet a situation demanding more of him than he had to offer’ – the Cicero Affair clearly not counting as a ‘situation’. Indeed, it was ‘proof of the high regard felt in the ...

Internal Combustion

David Trotter, 6 June 1996

The Letters of Rudyard Kipling. Vol. III: 1900-1910 
edited by Thomas Pinney.
Macmillan, 482 pp., £50, December 1995, 9780333637333
Show More
Show More
... letters he wrote to his wife describe his intense admiration for the ‘emptying out of love in anonymous work’ which had enabled Cézanne to render the ‘substantiality’ of the natural world. What finally persuaded him, however, of the essential loneliness of Cézanne’s effort to strip away the preconceptions which separate us from that world was ...

Am I intruding?

Peter Campbell: Open Windows, 3 November 2011

Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century 
by Sabine Rewald.
Yale, 190 pp., £20, March 2011, 978 0 300 16977 5
Show More
Show More
... let alone views, but there are enough that share Friedrich’s cool insistence that you enter his anonymous space and find its unspecified meaning for yourself to make you realise that his work had given a new emotional edge to room painting. The exercise Friedrich’s window pictures offer the imagination comes more often with poetry. Most obviously, in the ...

Everything but the Glue

Richard Fortey: A Victorian sensation, 22 August 2002

Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret Authorship of ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’ 
by James Secord.
Chicago, 624 pp., £22.50, February 2002, 0 226 74410 8
Show More
Show More
... superficially appealing but lightweight. Indeed, there were several female candidates for ‘anonymous’, based largely on the perceived ‘femininity’ of the book’s style. Viewed in this light, the comparative dryness of Darwin’s style could be seen as a guarantee of its sincerity and excellence – the word of a gentleman in a particular ...

Pick a nonce and try a hash

Donald MacKenzie: On Bitcoin, 18 April 2019

... is straightforward. When you join bitcoin, you use its software to generate for yourself an anonymous electronic address, along with a ‘private key’, which is a long string of binary digits that your computer uses electronically to sign a transaction, and an associated ‘public key’ that others can use to check the validity of that electronic ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: Thomas Pynchon, 8 May 2003

... The soundtrack is provided by the Residents, ‘the world’s most famous unknown band’, an anonymous group of avant-garde multimedia artists from San Francisco. At the very end we get to see the two unauthorised pictures of Pynchon. One of them is the handiwork of a hack called James Bone, who tracked the novelist down and took him crassly by ...

Simply Doing It

Thomas Laqueur, 22 February 1996

The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain 1650-1950 
by Roy Porter and Lesley Hall.
Yale, 414 pp., £19.95, January 1995, 0 300 06221 4
Show More
Show More
... seems unthreatening enough. Aristotle’s Masterpiece – not by Aristotle at all but an anonymous, very long-lived, much re-edited, 17th-century mélange of folk wisdom, medical knowledge and social commonplaces – and the French physician Nicolas Venette’s The Art of Conjugal Love provided pro-natalist, heterosocial, guilt-free guides to better ...

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