Search Results

Advanced Search

661 to 675 of 950 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

At least they paid their taxes

Linda Colley, 25 July 1991

Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorised Biography 
by Kitty Kelley.
Bantam, 532 pp., £16.99, April 1991, 0 593 02450 8
Show More
Show More
... not, as might have been expected, use Smith as a gateway to a nice fresh-faced Yalie called, say, Charles (‘Chip’) Staunton Webster III, with a law opening in Daddy’s firm in Boston and a summer place in New Hampshire. Instead, she took up acting, still very much a déclassé occupation, and decided to go to Hollywood. She got there, Kelley claims, by ...

Watch the waste paper

Mark Elvin, 19 August 1993

The Fate of Hong Kong 
by Gerald Segal.
Simon and Schuster, 256 pp., £16.99, September 1993, 0 671 71169 5
Show More
The End of Hong Kong: The Secret Diplomacy of Imperial Retreat 
by Robert Cottrell.
Murray, 244 pp., £19.99, April 1993, 0 7195 4992 2
Show More
Show More
... of China for mistreating Hong Kong after 1 July 1997 can be raised high enough to have some hope of being an effective deterrent to thuggery is for the question to be internationalised. The United States, the European Community, Japan and others should be persuaded to become collective guarantors of Hong Kong’s survival, under Chinese sovereignty but ...

Mae West and the British Raj

Wendy Doniger: Dinosaur Icons, 18 February 1999

The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon 
by W.J.T. Mitchell.
Chicago, 321 pp., £25, November 1998, 0 226 53204 6
Show More
Show More
... is misleading: in fact dinosaurs are neither reptiles nor lizards (nor, inevitably, terrible). Charles Knight, who painted them for the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago from the turn of the century, divided the ‘schizosaur’ into type A, the bipedal carnivore or saurischian (‘lizard ...

Colloquially Speaking

Patrick McGuinness: Poetry from Britain and Ireland after 1945, 1 April 1999

The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945 
edited by Simon Armitage and Robert Crawford.
Viking, 480 pp., £10.99, September 1998, 0 670 86829 9
Show More
The Firebox: Poetry from Britain and Ireland after 1945 
edited by Sean O’Brien.
Picador, 534 pp., £16.99, October 1998, 0 330 36918 0
Show More
Show More
... has still not been taken on board in Britain: they engage with a post-Poundian poetic tradition (Charles Olson, Edward Dorn, Robert Duncan, George Oppen) of a kind that gives modern American poetry its variety and experimentalism. Gunn and Davie are included in both anthologies, but to read their collected poems (the next step after reading Davie’s superb ...

California Noir

Michael Rogin: Destroying Los Angeles, 19 August 1999

Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster 
by Mike Davis.
Picador, 484 pp., £18.99, June 1999, 9780330372190
Show More
Show More
... recently pointed out, is superb environmental literature.’ Nineteenth-century geologists such as Charles Lyell rejected Biblical accounts of creation and catastrophe in favour of slow geological evolution, but Southern California’s Mediterranean-style desert ecology, Davis argues, with its ‘episodic bursts of natural energy’, produces ‘a ...

Diary

Andrew Saint: The Jubilee Line Extension, 20 January 2000

... always linked today with the design and image of the Underground, and with his fellow Northerner, Charles Holden, the architect who restyled several of the interchanges and built new stations on the ends of the Northern and Piccadilly Lines. Together, Pick and Holden are fabled to have created a ‘classic’ Underground image and tradition: signs, a language ...

Thou shalt wage class war

Gareth Stedman Jones, 1 November 1984

Proletarian Philosophers: Problems in Socialist Culture in Britain 1900-1940 
by Jonathan Rée.
Oxford, 176 pp., £15, February 1984, 0 19 827261 8
Show More
Show More
... Socialism, Communism, and all the other isms that then did abound. The ideas expressed by Charles Darwin, R.J. Campbell, Sir Oliver Lodge, Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald, Karl Marx, Noah Ablett were treasured in their minds as well as in the books they carried in their pockets.’ As late as the 1950s, Plato’s Republc was taken out more often from ...

Little People

Claude Rawson, 15 September 1983

The Borrowers Avenged 
by Mary Norton.
Kestrel, 285 pp., £5.50, October 1982, 0 7226 5804 4
Show More
Show More
... Borrower’: this may refer to some real-life dwarf to whom the name was attached, like the famous Charles Stratton, ‘General Tom Thumb’, for the Tom Thumb of early ballad or folk-tradition was sometimes literally ‘but an inch in height’. It’s essential for little people not to be ‘real-life’, though fully ‘human’ within their alternative ...

Carnivals of Progress

John Ziman, 17 February 1983

Sir William Rowan Hamilton 
by Thomas Hankins.
Johns Hopkins, 474 pp., £19.50, July 1981, 0 8018 2203 3
Show More
Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science 
by Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray.
Oxford, 592 pp., £30, August 1981, 0 19 858163 7
Show More
The Parliament of Science: The British Association for the Advancement of Science 1831-1981 
edited by Roy MacLeod and Peter Collins.
Science Reviews, 308 pp., £12.25, September 1982, 0 905927 66 4
Show More
Show More
... occasional cause of the foundation of the BAAS was a letter from David Brewster, in Edinburgh, to Charles Babbage, in London, suggesting this new initiative in their campaign to halt the ‘decline of science’ in Britain. The efficient cause of success was the Reverend William Venables Vernon Harcourt, founder of the York Philosophical Society, who became ...

Dishonoured

Michael Wood, 5 May 1983

The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformation 
by Ian Donaldson.
Oxford, 203 pp., £15, October 1982, 0 19 812638 7
Show More
The Rape of Clarissa 
by Terry Eagleton.
Blackwell, 109 pp., £10, September 1982, 0 631 13031 4
Show More
Samuel Richardson: A Man of Letters 
by Carol Houlihan Flynn.
Princeton, 342 pp., £17.70, May 1982, 0 691 06506 3
Show More
Show More
... Heaven.’ For Terry Eagleton, Clarissa is a martyr in a cause she could not know, her Christian hope really a proleptic figure for the consolations of feminism: ‘If for Richardson and his heroine that absent dimension has the name of God, we ourselves, reading the novel after the advent of the women’s movement, may perhaps give a more precise name to ...
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature 
by Richard Rorty.
Blackwell, 401 pp., £12.50, May 1980, 0 631 12961 8
Show More
The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy 
by Stanley Cavell.
Oxford, 511 pp., £12.50, February 1980, 0 19 502571 7
Show More
Philosophy As It Is 
edited by Ted Honderich and Myles Burnyeat.
Pelican, 540 pp., £2.95, November 1979, 0 14 022136 0
Show More
Show More
... quarrel with some of Rorty’s central contentions, my admiration for his book is tempered by my hope that readers will not too easily be seduced by it. What is it of which Rorty seeks to convince us? Primarily, that since the 17th century, philosophy has been dominated by a master image, the image of the human mind as a great mirror in which the facts of ...

Hofstadterismus

Andrew Hodges, 17 April 1986

Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern 
by Douglas Hofstadter.
Viking, 852 pp., £18.95, September 1985, 0 670 80687 0
Show More
Ada: A Life and a Legacy 
by Dorothy Stein.
MIT, 321 pp., £17.50, January 1986, 9780262192422
Show More
Show More
... a standpoint which contrasts strongly with, for instance, that of Freeman Dyson’s Weapons and Hope. The approach leaves me moved, and yet unsatisfied. For Hofstadter is not a common citizen, but one with access to fortresses and showpieces of American technology such as MIT and Stanford – shrines of the can-do, must-win ideology. There is so much to be ...

Oral History

Carolyn Steedman, 19 June 1986

The Hungry Self: Women, Eating and Identity 
by Kim Chernin.
Virago, 213 pp., £3.95, May 1986, 0 86068 746 5
Show More
Hunger Strike 
by Susie Orbach.
Faber, 201 pp., £9.95, February 1986, 0 571 13682 6
Show More
Holy Anorexia 
by Rudolph Bell.
Chicago, 248 pp., £18.95, January 1986, 0 226 04204 9
Show More
Show More
... in 1789, in which the victim’s mother was clearly implicated; William Gull’s and Charles Lasegue’s independent recognition of anorexia as a clinical entity in the 1870s, and their delineation of it as a psychological disorder as well as a physiological one. Then, its aetiology refined by Charcot and Janet between 1890 and the First World ...

Towards the Transhuman

James Atlas, 2 February 1984

The Oxford Companion to American Literature 
by James Hart.
Oxford, 896 pp., £27.50, November 1983, 0 19 503074 5
Show More
The Modern American Novel 
by Malcolm Bradbury.
Oxford, 209 pp., £9.95, April 1983, 0 19 212591 5
Show More
The Literature of the United States 
by Marshall Walker.
Macmillan, 236 pp., £14, November 1983, 0 333 32298 3
Show More
American Fictions 1940-1980: A Comprehensive History and Critical Valuation 
by Frederick Karl.
Harper and Row, 637 pp., £31.50, February 1984, 0 06 014939 6
Show More
Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism 
by John Updike.
Deutsch, 919 pp., £21, January 1984, 0 233 97610 8
Show More
Show More
... to Frederick Karl’s ‘Comprehensive History and Critical Evaluation’ with a mild surge of hope: at least he seemed to have a thesis. But all I found there was a laboured exposition of the academic party line: that the works of John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, John Hawkes and other ‘experimental’ writers constitute our authentic ...

Shaggy Fellows

David Norbrook, 9 July 1987

A History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and After 
by David Perkins.
Harvard, 694 pp., £19.95, April 1987, 0 674 39946 3
Show More
Collected Poems 
by Geoffrey Hill.
Penguin, 207 pp., £3.95, September 1985, 0 14 008383 9
Show More
The Poetry of Geoffrey Hill 
by Henry Hart.
Southern Illinois, 305 pp., $24.95, January 1986, 0 8093 1236 0
Show More
Show More
... of ‘Funeral Music’, we are the future that flashes back on the victims and we know that their hope of reconciliation is false; Mercian Hymns gives us an archaeologist’s vision of the industrial recent past. Hill has referred to Emerson’s notion of language as ‘fossil poetry’: a historical dictionary is the record of the linguistic fissures caused ...

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