Search Results

Advanced Search

61 to 75 of 81 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Perfect and Serene Oddity

Michael Hofmann: The Strangeness of Robert Walser, 16 November 2006

Speaking to the Rose: Writings, 1912-32 
by Robert Walser, translated and edited by Christopher Middleton.
Nebraska, 128 pp., £9.99, November 2005, 0 8032 9833 1
Show More
Show More
... the inevitable Kafka, and a further trinity of mad writers, Hölderlin, Nerval and Christopher Smart. The more genial and indeed congenial William Gass describes Walser more modestly: ‘He was a kind of columnist before the time of columns.’ And a further, more modest name is offered: ‘The signature “Harmless Crank”,’ Gass suggests, ‘could be ...

Skating Charm

James Wolcott: Kenneth Tynan, 13 December 2001

The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan 
edited by John Lahr.
Bloomsbury, 439 pp., £25, October 2001, 0 7475 5418 8
Show More
Show More
... witty concision is still quotable (on Gielgud in modern dress: ‘The general aspect of a tight, smart, walking umbrella’), much of his excitement outliving the occasions that produce it. But there have been other theatre critics with dapper styles and deep commitments whose names faded once their work slid out of print, once-prominent tastemakers such as ...

The Devil upon Two Sticks

Charles Nicholl: Samuel Foote, 23 May 2013

Mr Foote’s Other Leg: Comedy, Tragedy and Murder in Georgian London 
by Ian Kelly.
Picador, 462 pp., £18.99, October 2012, 978 0 330 51783 6
Show More
Show More
... whose wealthy but very dysfunctional family introduced what a later commentator called ‘a pretty smart touch of insanity’ into the Foote genes. His early years are typical enough of a spendthrift younger son battling his way out of provincial obscurity: a curtailed career at Oxford noted mainly for its bibulousness; a failed business venture in the ...

Ave, Jeeves!

Emily Wilson: Rom(an) Com, 21 February 2008

Plautine Elements in Plautus 
by Eduard Fraenkel, translated by Tomas Drevikovsky and Frances Muecke.
Oxford, 459 pp., £79, November 2006, 0 19 924910 5
Show More
Plautus: ‘Asinaria – The One about the Asses’ 
translated by John Henderson.
Wisconsin, 252 pp., £13.50, December 2006, 0 299 21994 1
Show More
Terence: The Comedies 
translated by Peter Brown.
Oxford, 338 pp., £9.99, January 2008, 978 0 19 282399 1
Show More
Terence: Comedies 
translated by Frederick Clayton.
Exeter, 290 pp., £45, January 2006, 0 85989 757 5
Show More
Show More
... women as both objects and victims of male sexual desire. Instead of the servus callidus, the smart-alec slave, we get a new stereotype: the bona meretrix, the hooker with a heart of gold. The female characters in Terence – including prostitutes and even mothers and mothers-in-law – are almost all nice, admirable, thoughtful, victimised people. The ...

Wrath of the Centurions

Max Hastings: My Lai, 25 January 2018

My Lai: Vietnam, 1968 and the Descent into Darkness 
by Howard Jones.
Oxford, 504 pp., £22.99, June 2017, 978 0 19 539360 6
Show More
Show More
... during their February 1968 occupation of Hue than the My Lai killers did. The Vietcong were merely smart enough not to allow their massacres – or their frequent disembowellings and live burials of village chiefs who declined to support them – to be recorded on camera, as My Lai was, or to become the object of war crimes trials. A majority of American ...

I have washed my feet out of it

Hilary Mantel: Growing up in Ghana, 21 October 2004

Hustling Is Not Stealing: Stories of an African Bar Girl 
by John Chernoff.
Chicago, 480 pp., £16, January 2004, 0 226 10352 8
Show More
Exchange Is Not Robbery: More Stories of an African Bar Girl 
by John Chernoff.
Chicago, 425 pp., £16, November 2004, 0 226 10355 2
Show More
Purple Hibiscus 
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Fourth Estate, 307 pp., £12.99, March 2004, 0 00 717611 2
Show More
Show More
... be called ‘Las Palmas, Weekend-in-Havana . . . Pussycat . . . Tropicana . . . Flamboyant . . . Don Camillo . . . Metropole, Lido, Apollo Theatre’. All the same, it’s no use tucking this list in your top pocket and heading for the tropics in search of a wild night, as Chernoff makes a practice of ‘switching them from one town to another’ and tells ...

Disaffiliate, Reaffiliate, Kill Again

Jeremy Harding: Régis Debray, 7 February 2008

Praised Be Our Lords: The Autobiography 
by Régis Debray, translated by John Howe.
Verso, 328 pp., £19.99, April 2007, 978 1 84467 140 3
Show More
Show More
... hint of France’: ‘the white wine’, ‘the shops’, ‘the high-heeled Lolitas in the smart areas of Providencia’. In Les Masques, he revels in the clear Santiago mornings and imagines the first balmy days of the Popular Front in France. Meanwhile he had begun to face the fact that Cuba was not the place he’d remembered. In February 1971 when ...

Shapeshifter

Ian Penman: Elvis looks for meaning, 25 September 2014

Elvis Has Left the Building: The Day the King Died 
by Dylan Jones.
Duckworth, 307 pp., £16.99, July 2014, 978 0 7156 4856 8
Show More
Elvis Presley: A Southern Life 
by Joel Williamson.
Oxford, 384 pp., £25, November 2014, 978 0 19 986317 4
Show More
Show More
... Frank Lloyd Wright designed house previously owned by the shah of Iran), he said to Geller: ‘I don’t want to perform any more. I want to leave the world. Find me a monastery. I want to become a monk.’ But his ascetic mood soon passed (as every Elvis mood passed, each brief and delicious horripilation), and the marker of this grand spiritual event ...

On the imagining of conspiracy

Christopher Hitchens, 7 November 1991

Harlot’s Ghost 
by Norman Mailer.
Joseph, 1122 pp., £15.99, October 1991, 0 7181 2934 2
Show More
A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs 
by Theodore Draper.
Hill and Wang, 690 pp., $27.95, June 1991, 0 8090 9613 7
Show More
Show More
... The Manchurian Candidate began as a novel by Richard Condon, who with Don DeLillo has done more to anatomise and dramatise the world of covert action than any ‘authorised’ chronicler. Before discussing Norman Mailer’s magisterial bid for dominance in this field, I want to use Richard Condon to anticipate a common liberal ...

Museums of Melancholy

Iain Sinclair: Silence on the Euston Road, 18 August 2005

... of suspended anxiety: the urge to fall asleep on an uncomfortable bench, to eat food you don’t need, to purchase goods as a token sacrifice against the hazards of travel. Leaving an older self behind, rooted, watching as you walk away, involves an element of risk. Stations are non-denominational places of worship, staffed by preoccupied ...

A Short History of the Trump Family

Sidney Blumenthal: The First Family, 16 February 2017

... Because they have never tried anything on the scale that I am trying things in this city. I don’t care about their goodwill.Then Trump fired the illegal immigrant labourers, ‘the Polish brigade’, after they’d completed their work, meaning that they were deprived of wages and benefits. The US Labor Department filed suit against him, a federal ...

How the sanity of poets can be edited away

Arnold Rattenbury: The Sanity of Ivor Gurney, 14 October 1999

‘Severn and Somme’ and ‘War’s Embers’ 
by Ivor Gurney, edited by R.K.R. Thornton.
Carcanet, 152 pp., £7.95, September 1997, 1 85754 348 3
Show More
80 Poems or So 
by Ivor Gurney, edited by George Walter and R.K.R. Thornton.
Carcanet, 148 pp., £9.95, January 1997, 1 85754 344 0
Show More
Show More
... Silent One’) Don Hancocks, shall I no more see your face frore, Gloucester-good, in the first light? (But you are dead!) Shall I see no more Monger with india-rubber Twisted face ...

Donald Mitchell remembers Hans Keller

Donald Mitchell, 3 September 1987

... as had Heinrich Jalowetz and Luigi Dallapiccola before him: Hans and I had published an article on Don Giovanni by Dallapiccola in Music Survey in December 1950, which had brought Jalowetz’s observation to our attention. One might argue about the prophetic dimension, but what is indisputable is the extraordinary intensity and compression of the music. It was ...

Ten Typical Days in Trump’s America

Eliot Weinberger, 25 October 2018

... Values Voter Summit, blames the allegations against Kavanaugh on the Fabian Society: ‘They don’t like what America is and what it represents, and they want to change us to another system. In order to do that, there are three things they must control: the education system, the media and the courts. The first two of those they have.’ But now they ...

Time Unfolded

Perry Anderson: Powell v. the World, 2 August 2018

... Cao’s is ultimately a tragedy, as his first modern critic, Wang Guowei, understood, even if we don’t possess the exact version Cao made of its ending.4 But the place of wit within it is not at all like the pockets of comic relief in Shakespearean tragedy. It is far larger and more defining. In David Hawkes’s translation of The Dream, an achievement ...

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