Search Results

Advanced Search

46 to 60 of 257 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Don’t talk to pigeons

Ben Jackson: MI5 in WW1, 22 January 2015

MI5 in the Great War 
edited by Nigel West.
Biteback, 434 pp., £25, July 2014, 978 1 84954 670 6
Show More
Show More
... Germany and at first didn’t hesitate to express his impatience with the scare: when asked by Sir John Barlow, MP for Frome, whether he was aware that there were 66,000 German soldiers in England and 50,000 stands of Mauser rifles stored in cellars within a few hundred yards of Charing Cross, he thanked Barlow for providing such an excellent example of the ...

Back of Beyond

John Barrell, 9 April 1992

Keeping a rendezvous 
by John Berger.
Granta, 252 pp., £14.99, January 1992, 0 14 014229 0
Show More
Show More
... they look so hard.’ Throughout this very varied book, and especially when writing on art, John Berger invites us to acknowledge the absolutes and universals which, he insists, lie behind the surfaces of things. He doesn’t have a great deal to say about those absolutes, and asks us to be content with terms like the essential, the invisible, the ...

‘My God was bigger than his’

Colin Kidd: The Republicans, 4 November 2004

The Right Nation: Why America Is Different 
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge.
Allen Lane, 450 pp., £14.99, August 2004, 0 7139 9738 9
Show More
Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet 
by James Mann.
Penguin, 448 pp., $16, September 2004, 0 14 303489 8
Show More
Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image 
by David Greenberg.
Norton, 496 pp., £9.99, November 2004, 0 393 32616 0
Show More
America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism 
by Anatol Lieven.
HarperCollins, 274 pp., £18.99, October 2004, 0 00 716456 4
Show More
Show More
... also provoke a degree of puzzlement, as much on the right as on the left. In The Right Nation, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, two centre-right journalists who work on the Economist, ask why only 54 per cent of voters earning over $100,000 a year voted for Bush in 2000. Why does the party of big business, deregulation and tax-cutting engender less ...

Farewell Hong Kong

Penelope Fitzgerald, 24 February 1994

The Mountain of Immoderate Desires 
by Leslie Wilson.
Weidenfeld, 374 pp., £15.99, February 1994, 0 297 81371 4
Show More
Show More
... father and mother. He believes that he is the illegitimate son of Queen Victoria by her servant John Brown, who must have ‘lifted his kilt’ on some unrecorded occasion. Everywhere, on tea-caddies and biscuit-tins, he looks proudly at images of his mother’s face. Samuel believes it, but we don’t, any more than we believe Pip’s great expectations ...

Diary

Christopher Hitchens: Reagan and Rambo, 3 October 1985

... came, Rogin believes, in 1981. ‘To confirm the President’s faith in the power of film, John Hinckley, imitating the plot of the movie Taxi Driver, deliberately shot the President on the day of the Academy Awards.’ It so fell out that Reagan had already recorded a breezy, upbeat salute to the audience at the Oscar ceremony: ‘the television ...

Pals

John Bayley, 23 May 1991

The Oxford Book of Friendship 
edited by D.J. Enright and David Rawlinson.
Oxford, 360 pp., £15, April 1991, 0 19 214190 2
Show More
Show More
... but to have a ‘friend’ – no, it really won’t do. ‘I’m your friend,’ said Myfanwy to John as they crouched in the ‘dark and furry cupboard while the rest played hide-and-seek’. Betjeman got that about right.‘We’ve always been the greatest friends’ – that is the kind of thing the lady says about her dentist or accountant, or a woman ...

Every club in the bag

Michael Howard, 10 September 1992

The Chiefs: The Story of the United Kingdom Chiefs of Staff 
by Bill Jackson and Dwin Bramall.
Brassey, 508 pp., £29.95, April 1992, 0 08 040370 0
Show More
Show More
... book about it. With trained military skill they camouflage their identity on the dust-jacket: Bill Jackson and Dwin Bramall they call themselves, for all the world as if they were just reporters on the Sunday Times. Then on the title-page they unmask their batteries, and we find that we are actually in the hands of General Sir William ...

Games-Playing

Patrick Parrinder, 7 August 1986

The Golden Gate 
by Vikram Seth.
Faber, 307 pp., £9.95, June 1986, 0 571 13967 1
Show More
The Haunted House 
by Rebecca Brown.
Picador, 139 pp., £8.95, June 1986, 0 330 29175 0
Show More
Whole of a Morning Sky 
by Grace Nichols.
Virago, 156 pp., £9.95, July 1986, 0 86068 774 0
Show More
The Piano Tuner 
by Peter Meinke.
Georgia, 156 pp., $13.95, June 1986, 0 8203 0844 7
Show More
Tap City 
by Ron Abell.
Secker, 273 pp., £10.95, July 1986, 0 436 00025 3
Show More
Show More
... are not Russian transplants, but Californians seen in their native habitat. We begin and end with John, an upwardly-mobile computer scientist whose work is connected (just how is never made clear) with nuclear weapons manufacture. At the age of 26, John belatedly realises that he is a workaholic with no private ...

A Poetry of Opposites

C.H. Sisson, 9 July 1992

Housman’s Poems 
by John Bayley.
Oxford, 202 pp., £25, April 1992, 0 19 811763 9
Show More
Show More
... not so overwhelming as to stop him going on with his work as a Classical scholar. His friend Moses Jackson, with whom he had shared a flat for some time, but who apparently did not suffer from a reciprocal emotional arrest, went off to India, and married. Housman became Professor of Latin at London University, and later ended his career at Cambridge, amidst ...

At the RA

John-Paul Stonard: Anselm Kiefer , 6 November 2014

... of the frontal and the recessive’ in these works, which he compares to the paintings of Jackson Pollock. He refers to the sense of being caught between diving into the image, drawn into the perspectival vortex, or remaining on the surface of the canvas, seeing it as a physical object rather than an imaginary space. For perspectival recession read ...

Guerrilla into Criminal

Richard White: Jesse James, 5 June 2003

Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War 
by T.J. Stiles.
Cape, 510 pp., £20, January 2003, 9780224069250
Show More
Show More
... Jesse James has stressed his Confederate roots and his support among ex-Confederates in Clay and Jackson Counties in Missouri. Stiles, however, distils James and the James Gang down until nothing is left of them but their secessionist convictions. Other reasons for their actions are ignored, marginalised or explained away. In Stiles’s hands, James is a ...

Find the birch sticks

R.W. Johnson: A spy’s diary, 1 September 2005

The Guy Liddell Diaries. Vol. I: 1939-42 
edited by Nigel West.
Frank Cass, 329 pp., £25, February 2005, 0 415 35213 4
Show More
Show More
... When Lord Halifax was sent off as ambassador to the US, bogus baggage was placed on the Port Jackson at Liverpool to fool the Germans, and when it turned out that the Port Jackson wasn’t going to America, the baggage was transferred to the Warwick Castle. Meanwhile, Churchill plus a whole crowd of journalists and ...

Oh God, what have we done?

Jackson Lears: The Strange Career of Robert Oppenheimer, 20 December 2012

Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer 
by Ray Monk.
Cape, 818 pp., £30, November 2012, 978 0 224 06262 6
Show More
Show More
... the only reason he was feeling better, however. On holiday in Corsica with his Harvard friend John Edsall in spring 1926, he took to reading Proust, and fastened on a passage from A la recherche that released him from his feelings of self-contempt by acknowledging the pervasiveness of human moral frailty – especially the ‘indifference to the ...

Green Pastel Redness

Colin Kidd: The Supreme Court Coup, 24 March 2022

Dissent: The Radicalisation of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Supreme Court 
by Jackie Calmes.
Twelve, 478 pp., £25, July 2021, 978 1 5387 0079 2
Show More
Justice on the Brink: The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett, and Twelve Months that Transformed the Supreme Court 
by Linda Greenhouse.
Random House, 300 pp., £22.50, November 2021, 978 0 593 44793 2
Show More
Show More
... never be construed as substantive: it was, by definition, procedural. The distinguished jurist John Hart Ely considered substantive due process an oxymoron, just like ‘green pastel redness’. Some conservatives asked whether abortion rights were conjured out of judicial subjectivity and caprice.Strangely, in retrospect, at the time of Roe v. Wade ...

The Nominee

Andrew O’Hagan: With the Democrats, 19 August 2004

... sidewalk before slowing to a halt outside the green house at 83 Beals Street, the house where John Kennedy was born. The windows on the ground floor had curtains of Irish lace. ‘That dog has no right to be walking over there,’ said the lady. The young man smiled and snapped his fingers. ‘Dog got no sense of history,’ he said, then he ...

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