Search Results

Advanced Search

601 to 615 of 632 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Higher Ordinariness

Jonathan Meades: Poor Surrey, 23 May 2024

Interwar: British Architecture 1919-39 
by Gavin Stamp.
Profile, 568 pp., £40, March, 978 1 80081 739 5
Show More
The Buildings of England: Surrey 
by Charles O’Brien, Ian Nairn and Bridget Cherry.
Yale, 854 pp., £60, November 2022, 978 0 300 23478 7
Show More
Show More
... three gables, two of them hipped, an eyebrow dormer like a lewd wink, thick thatch, an absence of straight lines and orthodox geometry, leaded lights and a quite exceptional abundance of ersatz beams and chimneys. Its improbable neighbour was Robert van ’t Hoff, a member of De Stijl and author of Lloyd Wright inspired villas near Utrecht, of Augustus ...

Where are all the people?

Owen Hatherley: Jane Jacobs, 27 July 2017

Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs 
by Robert Kanigel.
Knopf, 512 pp., £34, September 2016, 978 0 307 96190 7
Show More
Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs 
edited by Samuel Zipp and Nathan Storring.
Random House, 544 pp., £16.99, October 2016, 978 0 399 58960 7
Show More
Show More
... Protestant family in Scranton, a declining coal-mining town in Pennsylvania. She didn’t go straight to university, but moved instead to New York with her sister, Betty, and managed with impressive speed to carve out a career as a copywriter and freelance journalist – at first she got most of her commissions from a metallurgy trade journal, Iron ...

Negative Equivalent

Iain Sinclair: In the Super Sewer, 19 January 2023

... projections depict a better than real vision of uniform crescents inspired by Bath, and long straight avenues out of Haussmann, all wrapped in a green buffer of newly planted woodland with a strip of river frontage ‘accessible for walks and cycling as well as bird and seal watching’.This is good news for ex-industrial settlements struggling with debt ...

The Satoshi Affair

Andrew O’Hagan, 30 June 2016

... he’d rushed out without his passport. Ramona left the apartment shortly after Wright. She went straight down to the basement car park and was relieved to find the police weren’t guarding the exits. She jumped into her car, a hire vehicle, and, in her panic, crashed into the exit barrier. But she didn’t stop, and was soon on the motorway heading to ...

The Politics of Good Intentions

David Runciman: Blair’s Masochism, 8 May 2003

... some of the vices that Weber detects in the irresponsible politician? The American philosopher Michael Walzer, writing in 1973, in the immediate aftermath of another misjudged imperial war, detected in Weber’s ‘mature, superbly trained, relentless, objective, responsible and disciplined political leader’ a recognisable type: the type of the ...

Crocodile’s Breath

James Meek: The Tale of the Tube, 5 May 2005

The Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground Was Built and How It Changed the City For Ever 
by Christian Wolmar.
Atlantic, 351 pp., £17.99, November 2004, 1 84354 022 3
Show More
Show More
... they tried to haul full carriages up an incline. Geologically, the tunnels could have been mostly straight, but even though the Tube was far below the surface – 15 to 35 metres – such was the fear of undermining private property that the engineers sent them along the lines of streets wherever possible, sometimes even stacking two tunnels on top of each ...

Call me Ahab

Jeremy Harding: Moby-Dick, 31 October 2002

Moby-Dick, or, The Whale 
by Herman Melville, edited by Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker.
Northwestern, 573 pp., £14.95, September 2001, 0 8101 1911 0
Show More
Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live in 
by C.L.R. James.
New England, 245 pp., £17.95, July 2001, 9781584650942
Show More
Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival 
by Clare Spark.
Kent State, 744 pp., £46.50, May 2001, 0 87338 674 4
Show More
Lucchesi and the Whale 
by Frank Lentricchia.
Duke, 104 pp., £14.50, February 2001, 9780822326540
Show More
Show More
... whale’ fetching an American sloop-of-war ‘such a thwack that with all his pumps going he made straight for the nearest port to heave down and repair.’ Then there’s the famous story of the Essex, sunk to the west of the Galapagos Islands in 1820. Owen Chase, its Chief Mate, published a Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of ...

Growing

Barbara Everett, 31 March 1988

... ridiculous. Literary artists have worked in the genre: Poe, Wilkie Collins, Simenon, Chandler and Michael Innes among others. But the true English ‘classics’ of the 1920s and Thirties, the books we evoke in recalling a body in a locked library in a country house, hardly go in for artistry. V.S. Pritchett once wrote down the whole genre as philistine, and ...

Mothers

Jacqueline Rose, 19 June 2014

The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women 
by Elisabeth Badinter, translated by Adriana Hunter.
Picador, 224 pp., £10.99, June 2013, 978 1 250 03209 6
Show More
Are You My Mother? 
by Alison Bechdel.
Jonathan Cape, 304 pp., £16.99, May 2012, 978 0 224 09352 1
Show More
A Child of One’s Own: Parental Stories 
by Rachel Bowlby.
Oxford, 256 pp., £20, June 2013, 978 0 19 960794 5
Show More
Mothering and Motherhood in Ancient Greece and Rome 
by Lauren Hackworth Petersen and Patricia Salzman-Mitchell.
Texas, 274 pp., £16.99, April 2013, 978 0 292 75434 8
Show More
Sinners? Scroungers? Saints? Unmarried Motherhood in 20th-Century England 
by Pat Thane and Tanya Evans.
Oxford, 240 pp., £24.99, August 2013, 978 0 19 968198 3
Show More
I Don’t Know Why She Bothers: Guilt-Free Motherhood for Thoroughly Modern Womanhood 
by Daisy Waugh.
Weidenfeld, 240 pp., £12.99, July 2013, 978 0 297 86876 7
Show More
Show More
... others – ‘True and False Self’ and ‘The Use of an Object’ – are lifted straight from Winnicott’s writing. Bechdel tells us his life story, lays his 18 reasons out on the page (reminding us that he was ‘revolutionary’ for using ‘he or she’ and ‘his or her’ decades before anyone else). She also graphically pursues him ...

Veronese’s ‘Allegories of Love’

T.J. Clark: Veronese, 3 April 2014

... close on the flat. And this uncertainty spreads. Writers on Infidelity have often been aware – Michael Podro most eloquently – that Veronese’s main way of conveying the uncertainty of ‘positions’ in the circuit of Love is by drawing the viewer into a game of unreadable orientations. The woman’s back, shoulders and arms are at the heart of ...

Who Are They?

Jenny Turner: The Institute of Ideas, 8 July 2010

... that transcends ‘the left-right divide’. He seemed proud of quotes he’d found that made Michael Oakeshott echo Hannah Arendt – ‘whose work has really influenced my work’ – and Matthew Arnold agree with Lenin, though ‘you couldn’t be further apart than Lenin and Arnold on most things.’ It’s difficult to give a fair account of his ...

Snakes and Ladders

Stefan Collini: Versions of Meritocracy, 1 April 2021

The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain’s Transition to Mass Education since the Second World War 
by Peter Mandler.
Oxford, 361 pp., £25, September 2020, 978 0 19 884014 5
Show More
The Meritocracy Trap 
by Daniel Markovits.
Allen Lane, 464 pp., £10.99, August 2020, 978 0 14 198474 2
Show More
Show More
... equality of opportunity are based.But what is a ‘genuine sense’ of meritocracy? When, in 1958, Michael Young put the term into general circulation with the publication of The Rise of the Meritocracy (he did not, as is often assumed, coin the term), the suffix pointed to an analogy with democracy or aristocracy as forms of rule or government. It suggested ...

‘That’s my tank on fire’

James Meek: Video War, 13 April 2023

... line to Putin … he would not be making a regular spectacle of himself,’ the military analyst Michael Kofman, recently returned from Bakhmut, said in a podcast. ‘The reason he’s doing it is because he’s very desperate and he’s trying to get Putin’s attention by speaking to him this way, the way I would say some years ago I used to see people on ...

If It Weren’t for Charlotte

Alice Spawls: The Brontës, 16 November 2017

... get to look backwards, to say where things began. Brontë biographers have to acknowledge straight away not only the great distance separating them and us (or they ought to), but how many hills and trees now interrupt our view. It’s a truism that all Brontë biographers respond to Gaskell, but there are now thousands of other books too. Winifred ...

Magnifico

David Bromwich: This was Orson Welles, 3 June 2004

Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life 
by Peter Conrad.
Faber, 384 pp., £20, September 2003, 0 571 20978 5
Show More
Show More
... and the melodrama work hand in hand. The moral of the film would have been queasier with, say, Michael Redgrave and John Mills in these roles. There is no other movie on which Welles worked quite this alchemy; but there are few enough actors who have done it once. Harry Lime was a romantic part, as was Mr Rochester, and a secondary thesis of Conrad’s ...

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