Search Results

Advanced Search

76 to 90 of 364 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Funny Water

Frank Kermode: Raban at Sea, 20 January 2000

Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings 
by Jonathan Raban.
Picador, 435 pp., £16.99, November 1999, 0 330 34628 8
Show More
Show More
... Jonathan Raban is afraid of the sea, saying it is not his element, which is probably why he spends so much time on it. He does not claim to be a world-class sailor, though he is obviously a competent one. One good reason for sailing is that, being a writer, he likes to write about having sailed. Sailing is guaranteed to provide alarms and achievements for his pen to celebrate ...

Wear flames in your hair

William Skidelsky: Jonathan Lethem and back-street superheroes, 24 June 2004

The Fortress of Solitude 
by Jonathan Lethem.
Faber, 511 pp., £12.99, January 2004, 0 571 21933 0
Show More
Show More
... Jonathan Lethem’s novels tend to be fusions of genres. As She Climbed across the Table (1997) is a science-fiction campus novel; Girl in Landscape (1998) an SF western. Gun, with Occasional Music (1994), his first novel, is a detective story set in a dystopian future. Narcotics are doled out by the state, and knowledge of the past has been eradicated ...

The Last Georgian

John Bayley, 13 June 1991

Edmund Blunden: A Biography 
by Barry Webb.
Yale, 360 pp., £18.50, December 1990, 0 300 04634 0
Show More
Show More
... Barry Webb has assembled shows Blunden going out to bat with Rupert Hart-Davis, in a match between Jonathan Cape and the Alden Press. That was in 1938. Blunden looks miniature, a frail determined Don Quixote with eagle nose and jaw, who had persuaded the burly Yorkshireman as they set out for the crease together not to wear batting gloves, which were ...

Squidging about

Caroline Murphy: Camilla and the sex-motherers, 22 January 2004

Camilla: An Intimate Portrait 
by Rebecca Tyrrel.
Short Books, 244 pp., £14.99, October 2003, 1 904095 53 4
Show More
Show More
... than Andrew’s fling,’ Tyrrel says, and ‘he would have been looking pretty sweaty and macho post-chukka.’ Camilla soon started seeing Charles whenever he wasn’t off with the Navy, and Andrew whenever he wasn’t off with the Army. Charles had been encouraged, by Mountbatten and others, to have relationships with what Tyrrel calls ...

We are our apps

Hal Foster: Visual Revolutions, 5 October 2023

Tricks of the Light: Essays on Art and Spectacle 
by Jonathan Crary.
Zone, 262 pp., £25, October, 978 1 942130 85 7
Show More
Show More
... Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century (1990), the first book by Jonathan Crary, now Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia. The recent move to digital modes of image production and distribution had prompted Crary to reflect on revolutions in visuality in the past.Techniques of the Observer begins by ...

Places Never Explained

Colm Tóibín: Anthony Hecht, 8 August 2013

The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht 
edited by Jonathan Post.
Johns Hopkins, 365 pp., £18, November 2012, 978 1 4214 0730 2
Show More
Show More
... Tucson are swell, Mackie has an awfully nice Red Cross job (so we’ve enough money), I live off post and get to play tennis, I like the people in my department, I’m even writing poems. My two subjects are: bombing Hamburg and bombing crews – I feel sympathetic and sorry for both of them. Jarrell wrote to his wife about Allen Tate’s ‘Ode to Our ...

Life on Sark

Jonathan Parry: Life on Sark, 18 May 2023

... harbours in their modern forms, in 1866-70 and 1946-49. In 1838, the seigneur’s suggestion of a post office was rejected; letters from Guernsey were left on the beach in baskets until the tenants relented in 1857. In the 1960s, the eminent landscape architect Geoffrey Jellicoe was invited to produce an island development plan; Chief Pleas rejected it. Fear ...

The Gods of Greece

Jonathan Barnes, 4 July 1985

Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical 
by Walter Burkert, translated by John Raffan.
Blackwell, 493 pp., £29.50, April 1985, 0 631 11241 3
Show More
Show More
... particular attachment to an eschatology. After death nothing much was threatened or promised, and post-mortem hopes and fears played little part in normal Greek religion. (I say ‘normal Greek religion’: many Greeks feared death and ‘the things in Hades’; several off-beat sects – Orphics or Pythagoreans or Platonists – described an after-life of ...

A Kind of Integrity

Jonathan Barnes, 6 November 1986

Philosophical Apprenticeships 
by Hans-Georg Gadamer, translated by Robert Sullivan.
MIT, 198 pp., £13.95, October 1985, 0 262 07092 8
Show More
The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy 
by Hans-Georg Gadamer, translated by Christopher Smith.
Yale, 182 pp., £18, June 1986, 0 300 03463 6
Show More
Show More
... all, ‘uncompromised’ (the description is his own), and he came to play a major role in the post-war reorganisation of the university. But Leipzig was in the Eastern zone, and in the autumn of the year the Russians took over from the Americans. Plus ça change. Gadamer soon discovered that he ‘belonged to the political “élite” of the Soviet ...

The Real Founder of the Liberal Party

Jonathan Parry, 2 October 1997

Lord Melbourne 1779-1848 
by L.G. Mitchell.
Oxford, 349 pp., £25, May 1997, 0 19 820592 9
Show More
Show More
... in July 1834, only seven years after seriously turning his energies to politics, and he held the post very nearly throughout the next seven. But Mitchell’s Melbourne was a lazy and fatalistic dilettante; his rise, consequently, was not his own doing. Melbourne ‘sought nothing from politics but to be diverted and amused’; he ‘lacked a confidence in ...

What’s the big idea?

Jonathan Parry: The Origins of Our Decline, 30 November 2017

The Age of Decadence: Britain 1880 to 1914 
by Simon Heffer.
Random House, 912 pp., £30, September 2017, 978 1 84794 742 0
Show More
Show More
... now. This can be attributed to a range of pressures: the unattractive economic choices imposed by post-2008 austerity politics; the dependence on a particular unproductive vested interest, old age pensioners; and, above all, the allure of Brexit. The triumph of Brexit is the clearest example of the conquest of Conservatism by an idea which, whatever one ...

Grumpy in October

Jonathan Parry: The Anglo-French Project, 21 April 2022

Entente Imperial: British and French Power in the Age of Empire 
by Edward J. Gillin.
Amberley, 288 pp., £20, February 2022, 978 1 3981 0289 7
Show More
Show More
... from Canada, and France had assisted with Britain’s ousting from what was now the United States. Post-Napoleon, France tried briefly to use its power in Spain to maintain some influence in Spanish South America, now the site of multiple rebellions against European rule. By the 1820s, it accepted that the rebels, helped by British naval and commercial ...

After Andropov

John Barber, 19 April 1984

Andropov 
by Zhores Medvedev.
Blackwell, 227 pp., £7.50, June 1983, 0 631 13401 8
Show More
Andropov in Power: From Komsomol to Kremlin 
by Jonathan Steele and Eric Abraham.
Martin Robertson, 216 pp., £9.95, November 1983, 0 85520 641 1
Show More
Life in Russia 
by Michael Binyon.
Hamish Hamilton, 286 pp., £9.95, November 1983, 0 241 10982 5
Show More
The Soviet Union after Brezhnev 
edited by Martin McCauley.
Heinemann, 160 pp., £14.50, November 1983, 0 8419 0918 0
Show More
Yuri Andropov: A Secret Passage into the Kremlin 
by Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, translated by Guy Daniels.
Robert Hale, 302 pp., £11.50, February 1984, 0 7090 1630 1
Show More
Show More
... department of the Central Committee, which he did, though giving him an equally responsible role. Jonathan Steele and Eric Abraham characterised Chernenko as a ‘classic apparatchik’ who was ‘nothing but a Brezhnev associate’. But they also noted signs of his ‘continuing power’, and in particular the possibility that his being given the important ...

What’s next, locusts?

Pooja Bhatia: What Happened to Haiti, 23 May 2013

The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster 
by Jonathan Katz.
Palgrave Macmillan, 320 pp., £16.99, January 2013, 978 0 230 34187 6
Show More
Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti 
by Amy Wilentz.
Simon and Schuster, 329 pp., £18, January 2013, 978 1 4516 4397 8
Show More
Show More
... In January 2010, Jonathan Katz was working in Haiti for the Associated Press, the only American news organisation with a permanent bureau there. Other foreign journalists lived there, and a few more flew in for elections and catastrophes, but for the most part Haiti coverage had become a casualty of slashed budgets at dying newspapers and magazines ...

No Gentleman

Jonathan Parry, 23 June 1994

Joseph Chamberlain: Entrepreneur in Politics 
by Peter Marsh.
Yale, 725 pp., £30, May 1994, 0 300 05801 2
Show More
Show More
... abroad. Once again, the bile rose within Chamberlain. Sharing, in intensified form, the general post-war concern for Imperial security and economic competitiveness, and angered by the continuing complacency at the top of the Conservative Party, he launched ‘one last battle for a united Empire’ in 1903, proposing a scheme of Imperial preference behind ...

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