Search Results

Advanced Search

46 to 60 of 89 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Flat-Nose, Stocky and Beautugly

James Davidson: Greek Names, 23 September 2010

A Lexicon of Greek Personal Names. Vol. V.A Coastal Asia Minor: Pontos to Ionia 
edited by T. Corsten.
Oxford, 496 pp., £125, March 2010, 978 0 19 956743 0
Show More
Show More
... of Elizabeths, Sarahs, Janes and variform Anns (Nancys, Nans and Hannahs), you would have the Christian names of something close to 80 per cent of the female population. There was a similar pattern with Johns. About one fifth of all males in the UK between 1800 and 1850 were christened John and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the ...

But Stoney was Bold

Deborah Friedell: How Not to Marry if You’re a Millionaire, 26 February 2009

Wedlock 
by Wendy Moore.
Weidenfeld, 359 pp., £18.99, January 2009, 978 0 297 85331 2
Show More
Show More
... that nearly scans, about Saladin and his betrothed, the unfortunate Princess Erminia, who loves a Christian. Although Linnaean classifications were ‘too smutty’ for English women – all those reproductive organs – she was an ardent botanist, and sent expeditions to Africa, to bring back geraniums. While other bluestockings might have found themselves ...

Always the Bridesmaid

Terry Castle: Sappho, 30 September 1999

Victorian Sappho 
by Yopie Prins.
Princeton, 278 pp., £40, May 1999, 0 691 05918 7
Show More
Show More
... During the Middle Ages both she and her work were largely forgotten. (According to one legend, the Christian patriarch Gregory of Nazianzos, offended by the licentiousness of her subject-matter, put her books to the torch in 380 AD.) Neither Dante nor Chaucer refers to her. Only with the recovery and translation of certain ancient texts in the Renaissance ...

L’Emmerdeur

Douglas Johnson, 20 May 1982

La Cérémonie des Adieux 
by Simone de Beauvoir.
Gallimard, 559 pp., £9.25, November 1981
Show More
Mes Années Sartre 
by Georges Michel.
Hachette, 217 pp., £6.15
Show More
Oeuvres Romanesques 
by Jean-Paul Sartre, edited by Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka.
Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2174 pp., £22.50, January 1982
Show More
Show More
... he commented. (The matter was all the more delicate since the dummy book affected to be a work of Christian morality and was therefore even more conspicuous. When the book was finally concealed on the shelves Sartre commented: ‘C’est tout de même utile, la littérature.’) There will, obviously, be other books about Sartre’s private life and it seems ...

Business as Usual

J. Hoberman: Hitler in Hollywood, 19 December 2013

Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-39 
by Thomas Doherty.
Columbia, 429 pp., £24, April 2013, 978 0 231 16392 7
Show More
The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler 
by Ben Urwand.
Harvard, 327 pp., £19.95, August 2013, 978 0 674 72474 7
Show More
Show More
... who largely founded Hollywood and ran the studios were thought to embody dangerous foreign or anti-Christian values. Thanks to Henry Ford, the Ku Klux Klan and an abundance of political nativists, mass immigration ended in 1924, but as far as American purists were concerned, the damage had been done. The capital of this polluted nation was Hollywood; the men ...

Holy Boldness

Tom Paulin: John Bunyan, 16 December 2004

Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent 
by Richard Greaves.
Stanford, 693 pp., £57.50, August 2002, 0 8047 4530 7
Show More
Theology and Narrative in the Works of John Bunyan 
by Michael Davies.
Oxford, 393 pp., £65, July 2002, 0 19 924240 2
Show More
The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ 
by Isabel Hofmeyr.
Princeton, 320 pp., £41.95, January 2004, 0 691 11655 5
Show More
Show More
... shows, he wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress, which was published in 1678, not only as a guide to the Christian life, but as an attempt to shape the Restoration crisis of 1667-73 by setting liberty of conscience against the state’s authority and the conformity of the rich, the corrupt, the careerist and the spineless. Greaves says there is ‘no escaping the ...

Ruling Imbecilities

Andrew Roberts, 7 November 1991

The Enemy’s Country: Words, Contexture and Other Circumstances of Language 
by Geoffrey Hill.
Oxford, 153 pp., £19.95, August 1991, 0 19 811216 5
Show More
Show More
... Eric Griffiths. In an essay included in Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work (1985, edited by Peter Robinson), Griffiths expressed reservations about Hill’s ‘unsteady reliance on religious metaphors’ in his critical writings. In Hill’s essay ‘Poetry as “Menace” and “Atonement” ’ in particular, the idea that poetic language may escape from ...

Diary

Christopher Hitchens: The Salman Rushdie Acid Test, 24 February 1994

... between Bosnia’s attempt to uphold a secular, pluralist Islamic culture – this time against Christian medievalism – and the Ayatollah’s attempt to define Islam as a theocratic uniformity. (In a rather mad piece in a recent New Yorker, Cynthia Ozick compared Rushdie to ‘a little Israel’, surrounded as he was by ravening Muslim wolves, and also ...

English Changing

Frank Kermode, 7 February 1980

The State of the Language 
edited by Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks.
California, 609 pp., £14.95, January 1980, 0 520 03763 4
Show More
Show More
... social or cultural collapse, as Ben Jonson did, and this view is intemperately represented by Ian Robinson. He holds that the decline of the ceremonious style in the House of Commons is a clear indication of national decadence in this ‘century of the common man, of the “media”, and a “public opinion” definable by poll counts, the age of universal ...

Rules, Rules

Hugh Kenner, 18 July 1996

The Oxford English Grammar 
by Sidney Greenbaum.
Oxford, 652 pp., £25, February 1996, 0 19 861250 8
Show More
Show More
... will bring us to Sunt lacrimae rerum may be ‘In this fallen world we weep’, and in adducing Christian theology that greatly falsifies Virgil. Next, ‘A verb taking one object is monotransitive, a verb taking two objects is ditransitive.’ ‘Monotransitive’, ‘ditransitive’: consider yourself present at the birth; neither of those words is to be ...

It Just Sounded Good

Bernard Porter: Lady Hester Stanhope, 23 October 2008

Star of the Morning: The Extraordinary Life of Lady Hester Stanhope 
by Kirsten Ellis.
HarperPress, 444 pp., £25, August 2008, 978 0 00 717030 2
Show More
Show More
... that when he was a child in the 1820s Lady Hester Stanhope’s name was as well known to him as Robinson Crusoe’s, though he thought Crusoe was more believable. A century later, her table-talk (retailed in six volumes by her doctor-companion, Charles Meryon, and first published in 1845-46) was still being studied for the School Certificate. Admired as the ...

He’ll have brought it on Himself

Colm Tóibín, 22 May 1997

Sex, Nation and Dissent in Irish Writing 
edited by Éibhear Walshe.
Cork, 210 pp., £40, April 1997, 1 85918 013 2
Show More
Gooddbye to Catholic Ireland 
by Mary Kenny.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 320 pp., £20, March 1997, 1 85619 751 4
Show More
Show More
... she calls ‘a social, personal and cultural history from the fall of Parnell to the realm of Mary Robinson’, does not list Micheál Mac Gréil’s books in the bibliography. Her book does not deal much with Catholicism as a system nor as a powerful monolith. It does not dwell very much on how the bishops sought to control institutions such as schools and ...

Umbrageousness

Ferdinand Mount: Staffing the Raj, 7 September 2017

Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India 
by Shashi Tharoor.
Hurst, 295 pp., £20, March 2017, 978 1 84904 808 8
Show More
The Making of India: The Untold Story of British Enterprise 
by Kartar Lalvani.
Bloomsbury, 433 pp., £25, March 2016, 978 1 4729 2482 7
Show More
India Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire 
by Jon Wilson.
Simon & Schuster, 564 pp., £12.99, August 2017, 978 1 4711 0126 7
Show More
Show More
... coal mines. In the British view, India’s destiny was to remain what Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson called in Why Nations Fail (2012) an ‘extractive colony’. The Raj was seen at its worst in the hardest times, responding to poor harvests and the resulting famines as reluctantly as the home government did in Ireland. The last large-scale famine in ...

Schumpeter the Superior

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 27 February 1992

Joseph Schumpeter: His Life and Work 
by Richard Swedberg.
Polity, 293 pp., £35, November 1991, 0 7456 0792 6
Show More
Joseph Schumpeter: Scholar, Teacher and Politician 
by Eduard März.
Yale, 204 pp., £22.50, November 1991, 0 300 03876 3
Show More
Show More
... elections in Austria, and Karl Renner formed a coalition of Social Democrats and members of the Christian Social Party. Otto Bauer, a Social Democrat, was given the ministry of foreign affairs, and asked that Schumpeter should have finance. Another pragmatic Marxist, Rudolf Hilferding, had recommended him; Bauer himself was impressed by Schumpeter’s ...

Three Weeks Wide

Rosemary Hill: A Psychohistory of France, 7 July 2022

France: An Adventure History 
by Graham Robb.
Picador, 527 pp., £25, March, 978 1 5290 0762 6
Show More
Show More
... bicycle tour of France has something of all of these about it. Like Patrick Keiller’s film Robinson in Space (1997), which pursues the ‘problem of England’ through the eyes of an unseen narrator travelling in the spirit of Daniel Defoe along paths since obstructed by nuclear power stations and motorways, Robb covers French space and time ...

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