London Review of Books

Julia Caesar

Marilyn Butler, 17 March 1983

The Prince and the Wild Geese
by Brigid Brophy.
Hamish Hamilton, 62 pp., £5.95, February 1983, 0 241 10894 2Show More

“... current head of the family, their half-brother, another John Taaffe, to visit a distant kinsman, Lord William Fitzgerald. Actually they have been sent, all too transparently, to get themselves off the shelf. Gagarin is younger, 22, and a Roman resident. He has lived there since he was six, and now occupies his leisure studying art in the studio of the ...”

People’s War

John Ellis, 19 February 1981

Tomorrow at Dawn
by J.G. de Beus.
Norton, 191 pp., £5.75, April 1980, 0 393 01263 8Show More

The Crucible of War
by Barrie Pitt.
Cape, 506 pp., £8.95, June 1980, 0 224 01771 3Show More

Chindit
by Richard Rhodes James.
Murray, 214 pp., £10.50, August 1980, 0 7195 3746 0Show More

The Chief
by Ronald Lewin.
Hutchinson, 282 pp., £7.95, September 1980, 9780091425005Show More

Special Operations Europe: Scenes from the Anti-Nazi War
by Basil Davidson.
Gollancz, 288 pp., £8.50, July 1980, 0 575 02820 3Show More

“... refuse to believe that he had no further aggressive intentions were given little credence back home. One such was the Dutch Military Attaché, Major Gijsbert Sas, whose intuitive fears were greatly heightened when he made contact with a member of Canaris’s counter-intelligence department, Colonel Hans Oster, who was for a time privy to the innermost ...”

Writing a book about it

Christopher Reid, 17 October 1985

Collected Poems
by Norman MacCaig.
Chatto, 390 pp., £9.95, August 1985, 0 7011 3953 6Show More

“... fly’; and its very last lines – The black cow is two native carriers Bringing its belly home, slung from a pole – are an ideal blend of the comical and the exotic. The playful, humorous, genially delighted side of MacCaig’s poetic personality is one that many of his readers may wish he had cultivated more assiduously. It is this that lends ...”

Boundary Books

Margaret Meek, 21 February 1980

Kate Crackernuts
by Katharine Briggs.
Kestrel, 224 pp., £2.95, September 1980, 0 7226 5557 6Show More

Socialisation through Children’s Literature: The Soviet Example
by Felicity Ann O’Dell.
Cambridge, 278 pp., £14, January 1979, 9780521219686Show More

Divide and Rule
by Jan Mark.
Kestrel, 248 pp., £3.50, October 1980, 0 7226 5620 3Show More

“... A shared territory is the fairy-tale and its modern derivatives, of which The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are the best-known examples. Tolkien is also a subtle apologist for the creators of the secondary world of enchantment ‘into which both designer and spectator can enter, to the satisfaction of their senses while they are inside; but in its ...”

Gisgo and his Enemies

John Bayley, 13 February 1992

The Age of Battles: The Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo
by Russell Weigley.
Indiana, 608 pp., £22.50, June 1991, 0 253 36380 2Show More

“... reasonable accuracy impossible much beyond fifty yards, but attacks were only infrequently driven home. With the cavalry generally refraining from headlong charges as well, battle degenerated into an indecisive contest.’ Wallenstein’s mercenaries would much rather pillage than take risks in battle, and the commanders, too, preferred not to lose rather ...”

War within wars

Paul Addison, 5 November 1992

War, Strategy and International Politics: Essays in Honour of Sir Michael Howard
edited by Lawrence Freedman, Paul Hayes and Robert O’Neill.
Oxford, 322 pp., £35, July 1992, 0 19 822292 0Show More

“... as a One-Nation Tory: but he was the cousin and friend of Richard Crossman and perfectly at home in the company of Labour politicians. One of his hallmarks is an interest in the ideas of the Left and a readiness to address them with a measure of respect. He is, indeed, strongly reminiscent of the type of army officer in the Second World War who believed ...”

His Secret Opening

Joe Dunthorne: Revism, 2 April 2020

Childhood
by Gerard Reve.
Pushkin, 160 pp., £9.99, October 2019, 978 1 78227 459 9Show More

“... that book of yours – did you know that I wept while reading some of its passages?’ ‘My Lord and my God! Praised be Your Name to all Eternity! I love You so immensely,’ I would try to say, but would burst out crying halfway, and start to kiss Him and pull Him inside, and after a colossal climb up the stairs to the little bedroom, I would possess ...”

On Thatcher

“... if ‘youths’ put the boot in after office hours. No amount of moralistic afterthoughts by the home secretary is going to alter that. Meanwhile he should look round the table.Alan Bennett, 31 March 1988Personally , she is neither nice nor interesting. She has immense energy, remarkable tenacity and stamina, and a good brain. But she has a shallow ...”

Devils Everywhere

David Wootton: The Terrors of the Night, 9 March 2006

At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime
by Roger Ekirch.
Weidenfeld, 447 pp., £20, June 2005, 0 297 82992 0Show More

Saving the Daylight: Why We Put the Clocks Forward
by David Prerau.
Granta, 256 pp., £14.99, October 2005, 1 86207 796 7Show More

“... space’ on a moonlit night in Naples, is joined on the page by an English grazier, ‘treading home from an evening’s merriment’. ‘Would I had but as many fat bullocks as there are stars,’ he exclaims. To which his companion replies: ‘With all my heart, if I had but a meadow as large as the sky.’ In the dark, ghosts walked. Travel was ...”

The Journalistic Exemption

Jo Glanville: GDPR and Journalism, 5 July 2018

“... legal battles; some are reassessing the limits of public interest and the parameters of reporting. Lord Leveson proposed significantly limiting the scope of the exemption for journalism and giving the information commissioner stronger enforcement powers. Conducted in the long wake of his inquiry, the passage through Parliament of the new Data Protection Act ...”

In Pursuit of an Heiress

Nicholas Penny: Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, 16 June 2016

Letters of a Dead Man
by Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, edited and translated by Linda Parshall.
Dumbarton Oaks, 753 pp., £55.95, May 2016, 978 0 88402 411 8Show More

“... and white, with contrasting black-patinated bronzes. By chance an inventory of the contents of Lord Hertford’s villa in Regent’s Park survives which closely corresponds, although without the alarming carnal epithet. Other sources confirm his account of the extraordinary Chinese dairy at Woburn, approached through massed azaleas and rhododendrons, and ...”

At Tate Britain

Julian Bell: John Everett Millais, 15 November 2007

“... straight from the motif, with both the painter and Effie – his model – shivering in a stately-home bedroom on a December night.) No redundant symbolising dogs the brushwork here. ‘A cursive mode of painting, almost disdainful in its certitude, which rapidly envelops forms, seeking only their accent and wanting to extinguish at a blow the general ...”

A Plumless Pudding

John Sutherland: The Great John Murray Archive Disaster, 18 March 2004

“... a commodity in the saleroom, which it could never have afforded. Any publisher looking for a good home for his firm’s archive would be impressed by what the National Library of Scotland has done with the Blackwood papers, presented to it in 1942. The NLS has been similarly conscientious in its stewardship of the Constable, Oliver and Boyd, and Smith, Elder ...”

She was of the devil’s race

Barbara Newman: Eleanor of Aquitaine, 2 November 2023

Eleanor of Aquitaine, as It Was Said: Truths and Tales about the Medieval Queen
by Karen Sullivan.
Chicago, 270 pp., £36, August, 978 0 226 82583 0Show More

“... Eleanor and her daughter Marie of Champagne, give their verdicts. In one decision, coming close to home, Eleanor criticises a lady who wishes to stay with her lover even after he has discovered their kinship. A woman who ‘seeks to preserve an incestuous love’, she warns, ‘is going against what is right and proper’.Did courts of love exist? For many ...”

Resentment

John Sutherland, 21 March 1991

Francesca
by Roger Scruton.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 236 pp., £13.95, February 1991, 9781856190480Show More

Slave of the Passions
by Deirdre Wilson.
Picador, 251 pp., £14.99, February 1991, 0 330 31788 1Show More

The Invisible Worm
by Jennifer Johnston.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 182 pp., £12.95, February 1991, 1 85619 041 2Show More

The Secret Pilgrim
by John le Carré.
Hodder, 335 pp., £14.95, January 1991, 0 340 54381 7Show More

“... given to swooning when his problems press, Colin falls in love with the beautiful daughter of the lord who lives on the hill (soon to be developed – to the lord’s profit – into a housing estate). One track of the story is the comedy of Colin’s adventures with a sharply-observed set of upper-class twits and the ...”

Show more articles

More search Options

Browse by Subject