Search Results

Advanced Search

826 to 840 of 1986 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Drawing-rooms are always tidy

Ruth Bernard Yeazell, 20 August 1992

The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton 
by Gloria Erlich.
California, 210 pp., £13.95, May 1992, 0 520 07583 8
Show More
Show More
... novel. Such a claim does justice neither to the subject of this book nor to the numerous unknown people who have doubtless struggled, more or less successfully, to ‘mother’ themselves. The novelist’s greatest creative act, it need hardly be said, was the writing of her novels.What disappears almost entirely from this book is Wharton’s ...

Short Cuts

Tom Crewe: Found Objects, 12 August 2021

... as vulgar or childish, lower order, even irresponsible. We must remember that the past is more unknown than known, that the vast majority of lived experience is penetrable only to the guided imagination. If we pursue the dead, it is because they have left so many clues behind, and because we can’t help being curious as to what they looked like before ...

Vlad the Impaler

Inga Clendinnen: Hairy Humbert, 10 August 2000

Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings 
edited by Brian Boyd and Michael Pyle.
Allen Lane, 783 pp., £25, March 2000, 0 7139 9380 4
Show More
Nabokov’s Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius 
by Kurt Johnson and Steve Coates.
Zoland, 372 pp., £18, October 1999, 1 58195 009 8
Show More
Show More
... sites, as hungry humans push slash-and-burn agriculture ever closer to jungles seething with unknown butterflies. They tell us boys’ own tales of butterfly-chasing in South America – torrential rains, mudslides, sinister border guards. They try to persuade us that lepidoptery is the flagship of entomology (I prefer beetles). They flex their literary ...

The 4000

Michael J. Glennon, 19 January 2017

... Sachs partner and hedge fund manager whom Trump wants in charge of the Treasury, is largely unknown and has never worked in government.In addition to the 15 cabinet members, more than a thousand other presidential appointments require Senate confirmation. They include US marshals and US attorneys; a deputy secretary, a couple of dozen under-secretaries ...

A Palm Tree, a Colour and a Mythical Bird

Robert Cioffi: Ideas of Phoenicia, 3 January 2019

In Search of the Phoenicians 
by Josephine Quinn.
Princeton, 360 pp., £27, December 2017, 978 0 691 17527 0
Show More
Show More
... have no Phoenician literature from the first millennium BC – though, as the number of previously unknown texts discovered on papyrus over the last century should remind us, an absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence.As In Search of the Phoenicians pulls down one edifice, it reveals another: the idea of Phoenicia was largely an invention of ...

Nice Thoughts

Francis Gooding: Beaks and Talons, 21 February 2019

The Wonderful Mr Willughby: The First True Ornithologist 
by Tim Birkhead.
Bloomsbury, 353 pp., £25, May 2018, 978 1 4088 7848 4
Show More
Mrs Moreau’s Warbler: How Birds Got Their Names 
by Stephen Moss.
Faber, 357 pp., £16.99, February 2018, 978 1 78335 090 2
Show More
Show More
... table, intended to aid identification. Assuming, for instance, that you were faced with an unknown ‘land-fowl’, the first question to consider would be whether its beak was ‘crooked’ or ‘streight’; then, if straight, was the fowl large, medium or small in size? If medium, was its beak strong and thick, or short and small? Through this ...

Echoes from the Far Side

James Sheehan: The European Age, 19 October 2017

The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914 
by Richard J. Evans.
Penguin, 848 pp., £12.99, June 2017, 978 0 14 198114 7
Show More
Show More
... scope. Every explosion of social forces, instead of being dissipated in a surrounding circuit of unknown space and barbaric chaos, will be sharply re-echoed from the far side of the globe.’ Perhaps no less important for the pursuit of power were revolutionary changes in the quality and quantity of information people had about the world. At the end of the ...

Third Natures

Christopher Minkowski: The Kāmasūtra, 21 June 2018

Redeeming the ‘Kamasutra’ 
by Wendy Doniger.
Oxford, 181 pp., £14.99, March 2016, 978 0 19 049928 0
Show More
Show More
... of place in Doniger’s treatment of the sexual aspect of Hinduism because of something largely unknown, its typology of same-sex behaviour. The Kāmasūtra is almost unique in Sanskrit literature both in dealing with the subject in any detail, and in its relatively neutral presentation. The subject receives hardly any mention in treatises on dharma, but in ...

Strangeways Here We Come

Dave Haslam: Ecstasy, 23 January 2003

The Promised Land: Travels in Search of the Perfect E 
by Decca Aitkenhead.
Fourth Estate, 206 pp., £12.99, January 2002, 1 84115 337 0
Show More
Show More
... but despite the variety of ingredients found in pills sold as Ecstasy, killer pills are virtually unknown. Very occasionally an individual can react badly to the drug, but dehydration, overheating or excessive/compulsive water drinking are the most common causes of death. Around two million people are using the drug, if only occasionally, and there were 43 ...

‘Monocled Baron Charged’

David Coward: Vichy’s commissioner for Jewish affairs, 8 June 2006

Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland 
by Carmen Callil.
Cape, 614 pp., £20, April 2006, 0 224 07810 0
Show More
Show More
... quite brilliantly. This hugely readable slice of history seen ‘from underneath’ tells an unknown victim’s tale, rather as a generation ago George Rudé presented the French Revolution ‘from below’ by giving the perspective of the lower classes. Her detective work is superb, the social background vividly sketched, and the sorrow and the cruelty ...

Diary

Kathleen Jamie: High and Dry, 3 August 2006

... against the galley wall. There was no question now but that we would be taken off. In fact, unknown to us, a helicopter had been despatched from Stornoway and was heading over the Minch. However, we were asked again if we wanted to leave, and again we chorused no. By that point, though, I was ready to demur. The deck-sliding business had been ...

Bring back the 19th century

Miles Taylor, 22 June 2000

British Society 1680-1880: Dynamism, Containment and Change 
by Richard Price.
Cambridge, 349 pp., £40, October 1999, 0 521 65172 7
Show More
Show More
... years of continuity gave way to significant change in the 1880s. The death in London of the as yet unknown Dr Marx, and the birth of Keynes and Attlee, together with the publication of J.R. Seeley’s Expansion of England – all within the first six months of 1883 – are useful reminders of how the old world was giving way to the new. But was it really the ...

What Naipaul knows

Frank Kermode: V.S. Naipaul, 6 September 2001

Half a Life 
by V.S. Naipaul.
Picador, 214 pp., £15.99, September 2001, 0 330 48516 4
Show More
Show More
... on, and with increasing self-assurance. Travel was part of the solution: traversing the hitherto unknown world, he says, he learned to look in his own way. But he had first to deal with a known world: Trinidad, and his family, with its rather withered Hinduism. He left it all behind, not without a sense of guilt, for when he should have gone back to help his ...

Donald Duck gets a cuffing

J. Hoberman: Disney, Benjamin, Adorno, 24 July 2003

Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde 
by Esther Leslie.
Verso, 344 pp., £20, August 2002, 1 85984 612 2
Show More
Show More
... Dumbo had a deeply conservative moral: ‘Young Dumbo, instead of flying off towards some unknown paradise, chooses wealth and security and so ends as the highly paid star of the same circus director who once flogged his mother.’ Kracauer was more generous towards Fantasia, which he found experimental in its attempt to invent a graphic language for ...

Valet of the Dolls

Andrew O’Hagan: Sinatra, 24 July 2003

Mr S.: The Last Word on Frank Sinatra 
by George Jacobs and William Stadiem.
Sidgwick, 261 pp., £16.99, June 2003, 0 283 07370 5
Show More
Show More
... the news, again and again, until the magician is undone and the children are depressed. Jacobs, unknown to himself, has clearly spent his life yearning to be the magician he can only shout down. Thanks to George, or ‘Spook’, as his racist boss liked to call him, Sinatra’s life of sunning and sinning has a few new details, which will serve for some ...

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