Search Results

Advanced Search

46 to 60 of 109 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Six French Frizeurs

David A. Bell, 10 December 1998

The Perfidy of Albion: French Perceptions of England during the French Revolution 
by Norman Hampson.
Macmillan, 210 pp., £40, June 1998, 0 333 73148 4
Show More
Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders 
by Don Herzog.
Princeton, 472 pp., £18, September 1998, 0 691 04831 2
Show More
Show More
... Scarborough kept ‘six French frizeurs, who have nothing else to do than dress his hair’. Even Edmund Burke could not help admitting that ‘France has always more or less influenced manners in England.’ Yet co-existing with this French influence was what Linda Colley has called a ‘vast superstructure of prejudice’, directed generally against ...

On with the Pooling and Merging

Neal Ascherson: The Incomparable Tom Nairn, 17 February 2000

After Britain: New Labour and the Return of Scotland 
by Tom Nairn.
Granta, 336 pp., £15.99, January 2000, 1 86207 293 0
Show More
Show More
... being “pinned down” by that sort of thing. It continues to prefer the public-bar company of Edmund Burke to the saloon-bar rectitude of Tom Paine.’ Life after Britain, in other words, will be erratic and full of ...

In Disguise of a Merchant

Linda Colley: Company-States, 30 July 2020

Outsourcing Empire: How Company-States Made the Modern World 
by Andrew Phillips and J.C. Sharman.
Princeton, 253 pp., £25, June 2020, 978 0 691 20351 5
Show More
Show More
... companies appeared retrograde and unsuited to wider purposes. As P.J. Marshall has argued, when Edmund Burke began to launch his assaults on the EIC in the 1770s, it wasn’t because of any aversion to the project of empire itself but because he believed that imperial spaces could and should be decently administered, and that the company was grievously ...

The Cruiser

Christopher Hitchens, 22 February 1996

On the Eve of the Millennium: The Future of Democracy through an Age of Unreason 
by Conor Cruise O’Brien.
Free Press, 168 pp., £7.99, February 1996, 0 02 874094 7
Show More
Show More
... intrudes into the discussion. What matters to him is that Jefferson was a lifelong antagonist of Edmund Burke. And this, you must know, is not to be pardoned. Now (and here I return to my more-in-sorrow mode) we all know more about Burke – how to think about him and how to read him – as a result of O’Brien’s ...

The Departed Spirit

Tom Nairn, 30 October 1997

... Her death released it, and since 31 August it has been walking the streets. It may be the world of Edmund Burke which lies rotting in the grass: the deeper identity structure founded by Great Britain’s defeat of the French Revolution. The scholarship of David Cannadine and Linda Colley has shown how this was done and how vital the monarchy was to the ...

What is the rational response?

Malcolm Bull: Climate Change Ethics, 24 May 2012

A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change 
by Stephen Gardiner.
Oxford, 512 pp., £22.50, July 2011, 978 0 19 537944 0
Show More
Show More
... might be coextensive with democracy itself. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, it was Edmund Burke who argued that society ‘is a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are to be born’, and Tom Paine who, ‘contending for the rights of the living’, responded ...

Lawful Resistance

Blair Worden, 24 November 1988

Algernon Sidney and the English Republic 1623-1677 
by Jonathan Scott.
Cambridge, 258 pp., £27.50, August 1988, 0 521 35290 8
Show More
Seeds of Liberty: 1688 and the Shaping of Modern Britain 
by John Miller.
Souvenir, 128 pp., £15.95, July 1988, 0 285 62839 9
Show More
Reluctant Revolutionaries: Englishmen and the Revolution of 1688 
by W.A. Speck.
Oxford, 267 pp., £17.50, July 1988, 9780198227687
Show More
War and Economy in the Age of William III and Marlborough 
by D.W. Jones.
Blackwell, 351 pp., £35, September 1988, 0 631 16069 8
Show More
Robert Harley: Speaker, Secretary of State and Premier Minister 
by Brian Hill.
Yale, 259 pp., £25, June 1988, 0 300 04284 1
Show More
A Kingdom without a King: The Journal of the Provisional Government in the Revolution of 1688 
by Robert Beddard.
Phaidon, 192 pp., £14.95, November 1988, 9780714825007
Show More
Show More
... looked altogether less secure. The first centenary of the Revolution produced the clash between Edmund Burke, who regarded 1688 as the sanction of the unreformed political system, and Tom Paine, who interpreted Burke’s claim as a warrant for aristocratic oppression. In radical eyes, William III’s invasion had ...

Southern Discomfort

Bertram Wyatt-Brown, 8 June 1995

The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism 
by Eugene Genovese.
Harvard, 138 pp., £17.95, October 1994, 0 674 82527 6
Show More
Show More
... largely Southern materials, he stitches together the writings of an unlikely set of predecessors: Edmund Burke, the eccentric Jeffersonians John Taylor of Caroline and John Randolph of Roanoke, Old School Presbyterian defenders of slavery, T.S. Eliot, Karl Marx, Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, the Nashville Agrarians and their latterday apostles, Richard ...

Strutting

Linda Colley, 21 September 1995

All the Sweets of Being: The Life of James Boswell 
by Roger Hutchinson.
Mainstream, 238 pp., £17.50, May 1995, 1 85158 702 0
Show More
James Boswell’s ‘Life of Johnson’ 
edited by Marshall Waingrow.
Edinburgh, 518 pp., £75, March 1995, 0 7486 0471 5
Show More
Johnson and Boswell: The Transit of Caledonia 
by Pat Rogers.
Oxford, 245 pp., £30, April 1995, 0 19 818259 7
Show More
Show More
... seething with wit and brilliance from the likes of Johnson, David Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Edmund Burke, courtly politicians, cheerful whores, fine lords and ladies, down-at-heel actresses, a time of ‘free-flowing claret and sexual anarchy’, as Roger Hutchinson puts it. Strutting and tumbling through it all – and, of course concocting this ...

A Spot of Firm Government

Terry Eagleton: Claude Rawson, 23 August 2001

God, Gulliver and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination 1492-1945 
by Claude Rawson.
Oxford, 401 pp., £25, June 2001, 0 19 818425 5
Show More
Show More
... just about be salvaged. Richard Steele, Oliver Goldsmith, Laurence Sterne, Francis Hutcheson and Edmund Burke all made vital Irish contributions to this nouvelle vague of meekness, tendresse, womanliness, the glowing, melting sentiments, while David Hume, Adam Smith, Henry Mackenzie and James Macpherson weighed in from North of the border. The Irish ...

Nudge-Winking

Terry Eagleton: T.S. Eliot’s Politics, 19 September 2002

The ‘Criterion’: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Interwar Britain 
by Jason Harding.
Oxford, 250 pp., £35, April 2002, 9780199247172
Show More
Show More
... not a Fascist but a reactionary, a distinction lost on those of his critics who, in the words of Edmund Burke, know nothing of politics but the passions they incite. Ideologically speaking, Fascism is as double-visaged as the Modernism with which it was sometimes involved, casting a backward glance to the primitive and primordial while steaming ...

Marks of Inferiority

Freya Johnston: Wollstonecraft’s Distinction, 4 February 2021

Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion and Politics 
by Sylvana Tomaselli.
Princeton, 230 pp., £25, December 2020, 978 0 691 16903 3
Show More
Show More
... as ‘vain inconsiderate dolls’ and satirised men who thought or wrote as if they were female. Edmund Burke, target of her first Vindication, is ridiculed as a bit of a girl – someone whose ‘theatrical attitudes’, ‘sentimental exclamations’ and ‘pampered sensibility’ in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) would find favour ...

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
... trade. Engravings shaped public taste, and the printsellers determined what was worth engraving. Edmund Burke referred to John Boydell, London’s most powerful printseller, as ‘an English Tradesman who patronises the art better than the grand Monarque of France’. He, as much as Reynolds, was an arbiter of the nation’s tastes. At a Royal Academy ...

Cool It

Jenny Diski, 18 July 1996

I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination 
by Francis Spufford.
Faber, 356 pp., £15.99, June 1996, 9780571144877
Show More
Show More
... ice and to the meaning of exploration had built up since the mid-18th century, when the schoolboy Edmund Burke, watching the Liffey overflow its banks into the streets of Dublin, began to define the feelings it evoked as the Sublime: the terrible but inspiring otherness of nature out of control, the voice of this otherness calling to the soul and making ...

Oak in a Flowerpot

Anthony Pagden: When Britons were slaves, 14 November 2002

Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600-1850 
by Linda Colley.
Cape, 438 pp., £20, September 2002, 0 224 05925 4
Show More
Show More
... great and illustrious exploits were daily performed on that conspicuous theatre by Britons,’ Edmund Burke complained in 1784 with reference to India. ‘We never hear of any of the natives being actors.’ Yet in India, above all, it was these natives who upheld the Empire. The British exploited differences and ancient antagonisms between local ...

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