Search Results

Advanced Search

601 to 615 of 1796 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Bonkers about Boys

James Davidson: Alexander the Great, 1 November 2001

Alexander the Great in Fact and Fiction 
edited by A.B. Bosworth and E.J. Baynham.
Oxford, 370 pp., £35, September 2000, 0 19 815287 6
Show More
Show More
... texts written by men who lived in the time of Alexander or knew someone who had. Soon after the King’s death, little tracts appeared. In ‘The Last Days of Alexander and Hephaestion’, Ephippus described the drunken excesses of Alexander and his ‘best friend’ on their return from India, how Alexander liked to dress up as a god, wearing the ram’s ...

Incandescences

Richard Poirier, 20 December 1979

The Powers that Be 
by David Halberstam.
Chatto, 771 pp., £9.95
Show More
Show More
... No one in Washington could match him at it, not even, in the days before he became President, John F. Kennedy. He was handsome and slim and when he smiled, at first shy and then bold, everything stopped. He was the Sun King. Less the Sun King, given Halberstam’s subsequent ...

Men are just boys

Marina Warner: Boys’ Play, 6 May 2021

No Boys Play Here: A Story of Shakespeare and My Family’s Missing Men 
by Sally Bayley.
William Collins, 253 pp., £14.99, January, 978 0 00 831888 8
Show More
Show More
... 19th century – a good boy doesn’t throw his footman out of the window. The book is in the John Johnson Collection of Ephemera at the Bodleian, and this scene was pictured, as I recall, taking place in a panelled room – a prefects’ study, perhaps, or a dining club. Boys’ play, then. And although circumstances and contexts change, still ...

Through Plate-Glass

Ian Sansom: Jonathan Coe, 10 May 2001

The Rotters’ Club 
by Jonathan Coe.
Viking, 405 pp., £14.99, April 2001, 0 670 89252 1
Show More
Show More
... do their best to disavow. At the end of What a Carve Up! (1994) Coe acknowledges the work of Frank King, and writes: ‘the only repayment I can offer him is to recommend that readers make every effort to seek out these and other novels … and campaign vigorously for their reissue.’ In The Rotters’ Club he goes even further and lists the dozen or so books ...

Mistaken or Doomed

Thomas Jones: Barry Unsworth, 12 March 2009

Land of Marvels 
by Barry Unsworth.
Hutchinson, 287 pp., £18.99, January 2009, 978 0 09 192617 5
Show More
Show More
... four white police officers were acquitted of using excessive force in the act of arresting Rodney King, a black man, Unsworth won half the Booker Prize – the other half went to Michael Ondaatje for The English Patient – for a novel that in its unsparing portrayal of life aboard an 18th-century slave ship looked back to the colonial and commercial origins ...

What is a Bosnian?

John Fine, 28 April 1994

Bosnia: A Short History 
by Noel Malcolm.
Macmillan, 340 pp., £17.50, March 1994, 0 333 61677 4
Show More
Show More
... the idea of a Yugoslav identity. The use of the name ‘Yugoslav’ had been encouraged by King Alexander when he established his dictatorship in 1929, but it immediately became a cover for what remained a greater Serbia, thus acquiring a bad odour. Tito avoided it, promoting instead the concepts of brotherhood and unity among the different ...

Home Stretch

John Sutherland: David Storey, 17 September 1998

A Serious Man 
by David Storey.
Cape, 359 pp., £16.99, June 1998, 9780224051583
Show More
Saville 
by David Storey.
Vintage, 555 pp., £6.99, June 1998, 0 09 927408 6
Show More
Show More
... since he throws up so many masking pseudonyms for Wakefield, it is usually given the same name – King Edward’s. Typically, having been crammed for the ‘scholarship’ and pushed into the school by his miner father, the Storey hero loses his way. He is bolshy, good at the wrong sports (despises Rugby Union – gentleman’s football), truants, makes ...

Donald’s Duck

John Sturrock, 22 August 1996

Bradman 
by Charles Williams.
Little, Brown, 336 pp., £20, August 1996, 0 316 88097 3
Show More
Show More
... being a Dominion meant being neglected financially, not sustained. In which climate, to be for King and Empire, as if nothing had changed, meant taking sides whether you liked it or not. Bradman didn’t like it, going out of his way to say he had no politics. This seems to have worked, inasmuch as no one knew what, in any party sense, his politics ...

Illuminating, horrible etc

Jenny Turner: David Foster Wallace, 14 April 2011

Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace 
by David Lipsky.
Broadway, 320 pp., $16.99, 9780307592439
Show More
The Pale KingAn Unfinished Novel 
by David Foster Wallace.
Hamish Hamilton, 547 pp., £20, April 2011, 978 0 241 14480 0
Show More
Show More
... of papers sold to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. And now, here’s The Pale King, this book-shaped version of the ‘long thing’, assembled by Michael Pietsch, Wallace’s editor on Infinite Jest, from ‘a neat stack of manuscript, 12 chapters totalling nearly 250 pages’ discovered by Wallace’s agent on the desk in his home ...

That sh—te Creech

James Buchan: The Scottish Enlightenment, 5 April 2007

The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in 18th-Century Britain, Ireland and America 
by Richard Sher.
Chicago, 815 pp., £25.50, February 2007, 978 0 226 75252 5
Show More
Show More
... Strahan, Thomas Cadell (father and son) and George Robinson in London, and Alexander Kincaid, John Balfour, John Bell and William Creech in Edinburgh, were not ‘mechanicks’ as Strahan once complained, but collaborators in a London-Edinburgh publishing enterprise that put Scotland on the literary map. For ...

‘A Being full of Witching’

Charles Nicholl: The ‘poor half-harlot’ of Hazlitt’s affections, 18 May 2000

... works blowing over from Newington Butts. She was 77 years old, a relic of the days of mad King George. She had outlived both her husband and her son. It was her daughter-in-law Caroline, now married to a clerk named Eastwood, who was with her when she died. There were no obituaries. It was a small event in a small corner of the metropolis; a drop in ...

Effervescence

Alan Ryan, 9 November 1989

Burke and the Fall of Language: The French Revolution as Linguistic Event 
by Steven Blakemore.
University Press of New England, 115 pp., £10, April 1989, 0 87451 452 5
Show More
The Impact of the French Revolution on European Consciousness 
edited by H.T. Mason and William Doyle.
Sutton, 205 pp., £17.95, June 1989, 0 86299 483 7
Show More
The French Revolution and the Enlightenment in England 1789-1832 
by Seamus Deane.
Harvard, 212 pp., £19.95, November 1988, 0 674 32240 1
Show More
Show More
... were redefined and renamed, the names of the days and the months were changed, while the King of France was first renamed ‘the King of the French’ and finally ‘Citizen Capet’. It was a literary event in another sense, too. Controversialists on every side tried self-consciously to attain a rhetorical pitch ...

We Do Ron Ron Ron, We Do Ron Ron

James Meek: Welcome to McDonald’s, 24 May 2001

Fast-Food Nation 
by Eric Schlosser.
Allen Lane, 356 pp., £9.99, April 2001, 0 7139 9602 1
Show More
Show More
... to make their employees conform to their technology rather than the other way around. Insta-Burger King, later to become Burger King, used to have machines which made milkshakes and burgers automatically. Prospective franchisees were told: ‘Both machines have been thoroughly perfected … are of foolproof design – can be ...

The Beautiful Ones

Jon Day: The Rat in the Head, 24 July 2025

Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B. Calhoun 
by Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden.
Melville House, 358 pp., £30, July 2024, 978 1 68589 099 5
Show More
Dr Calhoun’s Mousery: The Strange Tale of a Celebrated Scientist, a Rodent Dystopia and the Future of Humanity 
by Lee Alan Dugatkin.
Chicago, 295 pp., £22, October 2024, 978 0 226 82785 8
Show More
Show More
... own experiments, thought Rattus norvegicus might be suitable.In 1909 Donaldson’s colleague Helen King began to breed rats, selecting offspring for their docility and fertility. After six years, 28 generations and tens of thousands of rats, King had bred what she considered the ‘perfect specimen’: a stable strain ...

Why are you still here?

James Meek: Who owns Grimsby?, 23 April 2015

... And what will the succession be?People tell you in Grimsby there was only one power: that fish was king, and that it didn’t abdicate, it was overthrown by foreigners. Once, the world’s largest ice factory would turn out gargantuan ice blocks to be crushed by the ton, carried on conveyors to the dockside and poured from chutes into the holds of the ...

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