Search Results

Advanced Search

61 to 75 of 111 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Building an Empire

J. Hoberman: Oscar Micheaux, 19 July 2001

Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films and His Audiences 
by Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence.
Rutgers, 280 pp., £38.95, August 2000, 0 8135 2803 8
Show More
Straight Lick: The Cinema of Oscar Micheaux 
by J. Ronald Green.
Indiana, 368 pp., £21.95, August 2000, 0 253 33753 4
Show More
Show More
... in slavery and he was raised on a farm in rural Illinois. He worked for several years as a Pullman porter – one of the few professional jobs available to African American men – and purchased a homestead in South Dakota. (The state had a population of 166 blacks according to its 1905 census.) There, in 1913, Micheaux began his artistic career with a ...

I didn’t do anything wrong in the first place

David Runciman: In the White House, 11 October 2018

Fear: Trump in the White House 
by Bob Woodward.
Simon & Schuster, 448 pp., £20, September 2018, 978 1 4711 8129 0
Show More
Show More
... is the one with which Woodward starts his book. Cohn, along with Trump’s staff secretary, Rob Porter, conspired to remove a letter from the president’s desk to prevent him from signing it. The letter in question was addressed to the president of South Korea, notifying him of Trump’s intention to terminate the US-Korea free trade agreement known as ...

What Marlowe would have wanted

Charles Nicholl, 26 November 1987

Faustus and the Censor 
by William Empson, edited by John Henry Jones.
Blackwell, 226 pp., £17.50, September 1987, 0 631 15675 5
Show More
Show More
... the first ventures of Ben Jonson – Hot Anger Soon Cooled, written with Thomas Dekker and Henry Porter, and Robert II, with Henry Chettle – now just bodiless titles in an old theatrical ledger. The case of Marlowe is, as always, more ambiguous. In some senses we can be grateful. Seven of his plays remain, and there is ...

Much to be endured

D.J. Enright, 27 June 1991

Samuel Johnson in the Medical World: The Doctor and the Patient 
by John Wiltshire.
Cambridge, 293 pp., £30, March 1991, 0 521 38326 9
Show More
Show More
... and intermingled. Wiltshire rightly devotes close attention to the poem ‘On the Death of Dr Robert Levet’ (in Johnson’s posthumously published Works ‘Dr’ was downgraded to ‘Mr’), first printed in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1783. In the lines ‘Nor, lettere’d arrogance, deny/Thy praise to merit unrefin’d’ it is hard not to see an ...

Sweeno’s Beano

Nigel Wheale: MacSweeney, Kinsella and Harrison, 1 October 1998

The Book of Demons 
by Barry MacSweeney.
Bloodaxe, 109 pp., £7.95, September 1997, 1 85224 414 3
Show More
Poems 1980-94 
by John Kinsella.
Bloodaxe, 352 pp., £9.95, April 1999, 1 85224 453 4
Show More
The Silo: A Pastoral Symphony 
by John Kinsella.
Arc, 108 pp., £7.95, January 1997, 1 900072 12 2
Show More
The Kangaroo Farm 
by Martin Harrison.
Paper Bark, 79 pp., £8.95, May 1998, 0 9586482 4 7
Show More
Show More
... poetry that has always been careful of locality: Randolph Stow’s early work, for example, or Robert Adamson’s Hawkesbury River poems, or, from an earlier generation, Judith Wright’s concern for landscape. The title-poem of Kinsella’s most recent book, The Hunt – Other Poems (1998), is dedicated to Les Murray, who reaches out to an international ...

My Heart on a Stick

Michael Robbins: The Poems of Frederick Seidel, 6 August 2009

Poems 1959-2009 
by Frederick Seidel.
Farrar, Straus, 509 pp., $40, March 2009, 978 0 374 12655 1
Show More
Show More
... sixty-four miles an hour. The Ducati 916 is a nightingale. It sings to me more sweetly than Cole Porter. Slender as a girl, aerodynamically clean. Sudden as a shark. Seidel’s first book, Final Solutions, caused a minor scandal when it was chosen to receive a small award from the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association in 1962. The national ...

To Be Worth Forty Shillings

Jonah Miller: Early Modern Inequality, 2 February 2017

Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status and the Social Order in Early Modern England 
by Alexandra Shepard.
Oxford, 357 pp., £65, February 2015, 978 0 19 960079 3
Show More
Show More
... at the church court in Chichester. ‘Twenty shillings,’ he answered. He had been called by one Robert Constable to support a case for defamation against Stephen Pentecost. Pentecost’s witnesses said Tanner couldn’t be trusted: he was ‘a poore needy fellow’ with ‘a little cottage of his owne to dwell in … and noe other meanes to live’. One ...

A Blizzard of Prescriptions

Emily Witt: The Pain Lobby, 4 April 2019

Dopesick 
by Beth Macy.
Head of Zeus, 376 pp., £9.99, March 2019, 978 1 78854 942 4
Show More
American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts 
by Chris McGreal.
Faber, 316 pp., £12.99, November 2018, 978 1 78335 168 8
Show More
Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic 
by Sam Quinones.
Bloomsbury, 400 pp., £12.99, June 2016, 978 1 62040 252 8
Show More
Show More
... alternative therapies or placebos.’ A second piece of evidence was a letter by two doctors, Jane Porter and Hershel Jick, which appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1980. They said that of 11,882 patients at the Boston University Medical Centre treated with opiate painkillers, only four had become addicted. ‘All it offered was a snapshot of a ...

Diary

Will Self: Cocaine, 5 November 2015

... white rather than the right stuff. The cocaine literature of the era reflected these attitudes: Robert Sabbag’s Snowblind (1976) was a gonzo-inflected account of how one man, Zachary Swan, single-handedly turned southern California onto coke; and while there’s plenty of nastiness in the tale (how could there not be?), the overall impression Sabbag gives ...

Gaslight and Fog

John Pemble: Sherlock Holmes, 26 January 2012

The Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England 
by Haia Shpayer-Makov.
Oxford, 429 pp., £30, September 2011, 978 0 19 957740 8
Show More
Show More
... Field, whose watchfulness enabled honest Londoners to sleep easy at night; but, as Bernard Porter has described, misgiving intensified in the 1880s, when Special Branch was set up at Scotland Yard to handle counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency. Everyone knew that clandestine organisations like the Irish Fenians could be fought only with clandestine ...

Short Cuts

Matt Foot: Corrupt Cops, 8 February 2024

... August, the Labour Party’s spokesman on home affairs, John Fraser, wrote to the home secretary, Robert Carr, about the cases. The Sunday Times report on Fraser’s letter said that he had asked Carr ‘to pay special regard to the method of proof used by transport police’ and the lack of ‘independent witnesses’. According to the article, Ridgewell was ...

The Wickedest Woman in Paris

Colm Tóibín, 6 September 2007

Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins 
by Rupert Everett.
Abacus, 406 pp., £7.99, July 2007, 978 0 349 12058 4
Show More
Show More
... not given Lord Snowdon’s number but the number he was actually calling from, which belonged to Robert Fox and his wife, Celestia. Fox was arrested. ‘Robert’s been arrested,’ his wife said when she rang Rupert and Min. ‘We were just going to bed, and the doorbell rang. Twelve policemen burst into the house and ...

You have to take it

Joanne O’Leary: Elizabeth Hardwick’s Style, 17 November 2022

A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick 
by Cathy Curtis.
Norton, 400 pp., £25, January, 978 1 324 00552 0
Show More
The Uncollected Essays 
by Elizabeth Hardwick, edited by Alex Andriesse.
NYRB, 304 pp., £15.99, May, 978 1 68137 623 3
Show More
Show More
... voluptuous rebirth.’ There aren’t many skeletons left in Hardwick’s closet. Since 1973, when Robert Lowell published The Dolphin, a series of sonnets based on Hardwick’s letters to him during the breakdown of their marriage, the story of her life has been bound up with, and contorted by, his overbearing presence. Cathy Curtis, author of the first ...

Enlightenment Erotica

David Nokes, 4 August 1988

Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America 
by Peter Wagner.
Secker, 498 pp., £30, March 1988, 0 436 56051 8
Show More
’Tis Nature’s Fault: Unauthorised Sexuality during the Enlightenment 
edited by Robert Purks Maccubin.
Cambridge, 260 pp., £25, March 1988, 0 521 34539 1
Show More
The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature 
edited by Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown.
Methuen, 320 pp., £28, February 1988, 0 416 01631 6
Show More
Show More
... in Women’ and of ‘the Use and Action of the Genitals’. This cursory description confirms Roy Porter’s argument in ’Tis Nature’s Fault that, although well-known, Aristotle’s Masterpiece has too often been dismissed as ‘a mere catchpenny pamphlet’. In a careful exegetical study Porter argues that ‘far from ...

Sexist

John Bayley, 10 December 1987

John Keats 
by John Barnard.
Cambridge, 172 pp., £22.50, March 1987, 0 521 26691 2
Show More
Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare 
by R.S. White.
Athlone, 250 pp., £25, March 1987, 0 485 11298 1
Show More
Show More
... read so much of it. The young Keats read Mary Tighe’s verses with pleasure, and the Misses Porter, of Romance fame, admired his ‘Endymion’. Barnard is right to emphasise just how important the market for poetry was, which was why Taylor and Hessey, the young firm which took over Keats’s Poems of 1817 from Charles Ollier, were prepared to treat ...

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