Search Results

Advanced Search

46 to 60 of 249 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Strangers

Alasdair MacIntyre, 16 April 1981

Modern French Philosophy 
by Vincent Descombes, translated by Lorna Scott Fox.
Cambridge, 192 pp., £14.50, January 1981, 0 521 22837 9
Show More
Show More
... of literature who have presented their doctrines with that kind of cloudy enthusiasm which led Thomas Carlyle to call literature ‘a great foam-froth’. On both groups of authors Descombes is excellent. His account of structuralism with its emphasis on the debt to the mathematics of Bourbaki and to the practice of such anthropologists as Dumézil is a ...

Carrying on with a foreign woman

John Sutherland, 7 November 1985

Galapagos 
by Kurt Vonnegut.
Cape, 269 pp., £9.50, October 1985, 0 224 02847 2
Show More
A Family Madness 
by Thomas Keneally.
Hodder, 315 pp., £9.95, September 1985, 0 340 38449 2
Show More
A Storm from Paradise 
by Stuart Hood.
Carcanet, 188 pp., £8.95, September 1985, 0 85635 582 8
Show More
Samarkand 
by John Murray.
Aidan Ellis, 255 pp., £8.95, May 1985, 0 85628 151 4
Show More
The Sicilian 
by Mario Puzo.
Bantam, 410 pp., £9.95, May 1985, 0 593 01001 9
Show More
Putting the boot in 
by Dan Kavanagh.
Cape, 192 pp., £8.95, August 1985, 0 224 02332 2
Show More
Show More
... people are really good at heart.’ But, of course, Anne wrote that before the Germans got her. Thomas Keneally likes to run his fiction close to historical fact. An appended note to A Family Madness indicates the novel’s source: ‘In a suburb of Sydney, Australia, in July 1984, a family of five willingly ended their lives. Their consent to their own ...

At Waterloo

Rosemary Hill: The Château-Ferme de Hougoumont, 2 July 2015

... They took careful note of the lie of the land as well as the debris on the surface. Walter Scott was there, on his first trip abroad. By August, when he arrived, the site was a tourist attraction doing a roaring trade. ‘Men, women and children rushed out upon us, holding up swords, pistols, carabines and holsters,’ ...

Spanish for Beginners

Lorna Scott Fox, 14 November 1996

Lola Montez: A Life 
by Bruce Seymour.
Yale, 468 pp., £20, May 1996, 0 300 06347 4
Show More
Show More
... in Bengal. She got out of this by eloping to Ireland with her mother’s admirer, Lieutenant Thomas James. The shotgun marriage soon failed, however, and she escaped by way of another scandalous affair, with another lieutenant (called Lennox), who dumped her penniless in London just as James began suing for adultery. Rather sensibly, Eliza resolved to ...

Really Good at Killing

Thomas Nagel: The Ethics of Drones, 3 March 2016

Objective Troy: A Terrorist, a President and the Rise of the Drone 
by Scott Shane.
Bantam, 416 pp., £20, September 2015, 978 0 8041 4029 4
Show More
Show More
... sitting in a control station thousands of miles away. Who could ask for more? In Objective Troy, Scott Shane explains why Barack Obama, when he became president, favoured drone warfare as his chief anti-terrorism tactic over the conventional wars of his predecessor: The number of al-Qaida plotters whose aim was to attack Americans was in the hundreds. Yet ...

Self-Positioning

Stefan Collini: The Movement, 25 June 2009

The Movement Reconsidered: Essays on Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie and Their Contemporaries 
edited by Zachary Leader.
Oxford, 336 pp., £18.99, May 2009, 978 0 19 955825 4
Show More
Show More
... alike, to identify a new tendency in contemporary writing, before, on 1 October 1954, J.D. Scott, the literary editor of the Spectator, published (anonymously) a leading article entitled ‘In the Movement’. Modern Britain, Scott argued, was emancipating itself from the old social hierarchies of the prewar ...

Blighted Plain

Jonathan Meades: Wiltshire’s Multitudes, 6 January 2022

The Buildings of England: Wiltshire 
by Julian Orbach, Nikolaus Pevsner and Bridget Cherry.
Yale, 828 pp., £45, June 2021, 978 0 300 25120 3
Show More
Show More
... whoever designed it (Orbach proposes John James). The third prodigy of the English baroque, Thomas Archer, like Vanbrugh worked nearby in Dorset and Hampshire (both of which south Wiltshire might comfortably be part of). Vanbrugh is the possible author of Netherhampton House, between Salisbury and Wilton, a Venturi ‘shed’ avant la lettre. A ...

Allegedly

Michael Davie, 1 November 1984

Public Scandal, Odium and Contempt: An Investigation of Recent Libel Cases 
by David Hooper.
Secker, 230 pp., £12.95, September 1984, 0 436 20093 7
Show More
Show More
... the Sunday newspaper I had joined as a junior reporter sent me one Saturday afternoon to see Sir Thomas Beecham, then at the height of his fame as a conductor. The paper had written his profile, and I was told to take a proof and show it to him, to ensure that it was factually correct. Clutching the galleys, I rang the bell at his house in St John’s ...

Defeated Armies

Scott Sherman: Castro in the New York Times, 5 July 2007

The Man Who Invented Fidel: Castro, Cuba, and Herbert L. Matthews of the ‘New York Times’ 
by Anthony DePalma.
PublicAffairs, 308 pp., £15.99, September 2006, 1 58648 332 3
Show More
Show More
... later accused him of forging a ‘hero image of Castro, in which all the virtues of Robin Hood and Thomas Jefferson, of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, were contained in a single man’. Matthews’s series caused an uproar in Cuba: Batista himself was enraged by it, and one of his top advisers dismissed Matthews’s reporting as ‘a chapter in a ...

Clan Gatherings

Inigo Thomas: The Bushes, 24 April 2008

The Bush Tragedy: The Unmaking of a President 
by Jacob Weisberg.
Bloomsbury, 271 pp., £16.99, February 2008, 978 0 7475 9394 2
Show More
Show More
... about that: he said the fondness for clans was a consequence of a Southern addiction to Walter Scott. He was only half-joking when he said that Scott’s heroic clans, and their readiness for battle, were responsible for the Civil War. Unlike the Hunts, the Bushes have never had their tycoon, although several have tried ...

The Whole Sick Crew

Thomas Jones: Donna Tartt, 31 October 2002

The Little Friend 
by Donna Tartt.
Bloomsbury, 555 pp., £16.99, October 2002, 0 7475 6211 3
Show More
Show More
... She’s intelligent, imaginative, inquisitive. Among her heroes are Houdini and Captain Scott; her goals, other than tracking down and punishing her brother’s killer, include breaking her own record for holding her breath underwater. She likes to ask awkward questions, and to disagree with her great-aunts about the Bible. She’s ...

The Sovereign Weapon

Francis FitzGibbon: The Old Bailey, 5 March 2020

Court Number One: The Old Bailey Trials that Defined Modern Britain 
by Thomas Grant.
John Murray, 448 pp., £10.99, April, 978 1 4736 5163 0
Show More
Show More
... Thomas Grant’s​ Court Number One tells the stories of 11 prominent trials heard in Court One of the Old Bailey between 1907, when it opened, and 2003. His aim is to use these stories as illustrations of ‘British sensibilities and preoccupations over the last hundred years … Through the criminal trials … there can be traced at least one version of the history of social and moral change over the last century ...

During the war and after the war

J.R. Pole, 11 January 1990

Oxford History of the United States. Vol. VI: Battle Cry of Freedom, The Civil War Era 
by James McPherson.
Oxford, 904 pp., $35, June 1988, 0 19 503863 0
Show More
Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 
by Eric Foner.
Harper and Row, 690 pp., $21.95, April 1988, 0 06 015851 4
Show More
Show More
... Paul Finkelman, McPherson also presents a very clear explanation of the significance of the Dred Scott case, in which the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Taney declared the Missouri Compromise of 1820 unconstitutional, and added for good measure that when the Constitution was founded, a Negro had no rights that a white man was obliged to respect. This was ...

Damn all

Scott Malcomson, 23 September 1993

Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America 
by Robert Hughes.
Oxford, 224 pp., £12.95, June 1993, 0 19 507676 1
Show More
Show More
... and bulimic vulgarity got the genius it deserved,’ only to write a little later, apropos of Thomas McEvilley’s remark that ‘somehow the age demanded’ Schnabel: ‘the notion that the man is an emanation of the Zeitgeist no doubt matches the artist’s fantasies about himself.’ It also, of course, matches what Hughes has just said about him. I ...

Post-Cullodenism

Robert Crawford, 3 October 1996

The Poems of Ossian and Related Works 
by James Macpherson, edited by Howard Gaskill.
Edinburgh, 573 pp., £16.95, January 1996, 0 7486 0707 2
Show More
Show More
... direct or indirect sustenance in Macpherson’s poems: Burns’s visionary ‘duans’; Walter Scott’s ‘translations’ of ‘Highland Minstrelsy’ in Waverley; Fenimore Cooper’s translatorese standing in for Native American languages; Byron’s ‘Imitation of Macpherson’s Ossian’; Goethe’s Werther; and ...

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