Search Results

Advanced Search

991 to 1005 of 1595 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Half a pirate

Patrick O’Brian, 22 January 1987

Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates 
by Robert Ritchie.
Harvard, 306 pp., £16.95, November 1986, 0 674 09501 4
Show More
Richard Knight’s Treasure! The True Story of his Extraordinary Quest for Captain Kidd’s Cache 
by Glenys Roberts.
Viking, 198 pp., £9.95, October 1986, 0 670 80761 3
Show More
Show More
... knowing nothing about Kidd: buccaneers were not expected to produce credentials. In fact, Kidd is said to have been a minister’s son from Greenock in Scotland, but when he went to sea or how he learnt his calling does not appear. He learnt it fairly well, and the Blessed William served with some distinction against the French, sacking the island of Marie ...

Memories of an Edwardian Girlhood

Barbara Wootton, 4 March 1982

Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England 
by Carol Dyhouse.
Routledge, 224 pp., £8.95, October 1981, 9780710008213
Show More
Hooligans or Rebels: An Oral History of Working-Class Childhood and Youth 1889-1939 
by Stephen Humphries.
Blackwell, 279 pp., £12.50, November 1981, 0 631 12982 0
Show More
Show More
... and that ‘learning destroyed femininity.’ As a result, some of the more intelligent are said to have bribed their brothers by performing various small services in exchange for the loan of school books. In a minority of homes, Dyhouse admits, different standards prevailed, but not necessarily with happier results, as I can testify. Both my parents ...

At the Foundling Museum

Joanne O’Leary: ‘Portraying Pregnancy’, 2 April 2020

... photographs, objects and clothing relating to pregnancy from the 15th century to the present, Edward Burne-Jones’s Annunciation (1876-79) shows the Virgin receiving news of her pregnancy from the Angel Gabriel. This (the First Joyful Mystery) preoccupied me from the age of nine or ten. I may not have got my period, I may have been years from letting any ...

Had we lived …

Jenny Diski: The Afterlife of Captain Scott, 9 February 2006

Scott of the Antarctic: A Life of Courage and Tragedy in the Extreme South 
by David Crane.
HarperCollins, 637 pp., £25, November 2005, 0 00 715068 7
Show More
Show More
... it is shift for yourself.’ Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the myopic boy who grew up during that trip, said of Scott that he never met a man who cried so easily; later, in The Worst Journey in the World, he wrote, with stunning clarity: ‘I now see very plainly that though we achieved a first-rate tragedy, which will never be forgotten just because it was a ...

One’s Thousand One Nightinesses

Steven Connor: ‘The Arabian Nights’, 22 March 2012

Stranger Magic 
by Marina Warner.
Chatto, 540 pp., £28, November 2011, 978 0 7011 7331 9
Show More
Show More
... throughout the book she offers a gentle but insistent qualification of the view associated with Edward Said’s Orientalism, that the fantasies of the West about the East can be reduced to the use of knowledge as power. Warner’s purpose is to engage more seriously than Said with the work of enchantment that is ...

Making Do and Mending

Rosemary Hill: Penelope Fitzgerald’s Letters, 25 September 2008

So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald 
edited by Terence Dooley.
Fourth Estate, 532 pp., £25, August 2008, 978 0 00 713640 7
Show More
Show More
... job to another. An alternative version of him appears in Offshore, written after his death, in Edward, the husband whom his wife Nenna loves but cannot manage, somehow, to live with. ‘And now the quarrel was under its own impetus . . . And the marriage that was being described was different from the one they had known . . . and there was no one to ...

Termagant

Ian Gilmour: The Cliveden Set, 19 October 2000

The Cliveden Set: Portrait of an Exclusive Fraternity 
by Norman Rose.
Cape, 277 pp., £20, August 2000, 0 224 06093 7
Show More
Show More
... Queen of Romania, Queen Victoria’s third son, the Duke of Connaught, and less frequently King Edward VII. Rose quotes one of Nancy’s ‘most celebrated bons mots’: when invited by the King to play bridge, she is said to have refrained with the claim: ‘Why I don’t even know the difference between a King and a ...

In the Front Row

Susan Pedersen: Loving Lloyd George, 25 January 2007

. . . If Love Were All: The Story of Frances Stevenson and David Lloyd George 
by John Campbell.
Cape, 557 pp., £25, June 2006, 0 224 07464 4
Show More
Show More
... might be there, though, taking a few notes in the corner. Not without a moral struggle, Stevenson said yes. The partnership would last until Lloyd George’s death 32 years later. Stevenson acted as his private secretary through the second half of his chancellorship, his periods at the Ministry of Munitions and the War Office, his six years as prime ...

Part of the Fun of being an English Protestant

Patrick Collinson: Recovering the Reformation, 22 July 2004

Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490-1700 
by Diarmaid MacCulloch.
Allen Lane, 832 pp., £25, September 2003, 0 7139 9370 7
Show More
Show More
... must be prepared to take seriously premodern other-worldliness, to grapple with what St Augustine said about grace at the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries, and how Augustine was reinterpreted in the 16th century, most crucially by Luther, and in 17th-century France by Jansenists, who as hyper-Augustinians believed in a high doctrine of ...

Sterling and Strings

Peter Davies: Harold Wilson and Vietnam, 20 November 2008

... of men on the ground. Two platoons were suggested or even less or a military field hospital. Bundy said that the result of such a contribution would be worth “several hundred million dollars”.’ While this offer seems to have been withdrawn, for fear of alienating Wilson, US memoranda make clear that it represents the thinking of the Johnson ...

G&Ts on the Veranda

Francis Gooding: The Science of Man, 4 March 2021

The Reinvention of Humanity: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Remade Race, Sex and Gender 
by Charles King.
Vintage, 431 pp., £10.99, November 2020, 978 1 78470 586 2
Show More
Show More
... chimerical. It had no bearing on culture, intelligence or any of the multitude of things it was said to determine; nor were the so-called races hierarchically organised.By the 1930s Boas was using scare quotes around the word ‘race’: it was, he said, ‘at best a poetic and dangerous fiction’. He was continually ...

Blood All Over the Grass

Ewan Gibbs: On the Miners’ Strike, 2 November 2023

Backbone of the Nation: Mining Communities and the Great Strike of 1984-85 
by Robert Gildea.
Yale, 469 pp., £25, August, 978 0 300 26658 0
Show More
Show More
... involving 184,000 members of the National Union of Mineworkers and their families. It is usually said to have begun in early March 1984 when miners walked out of Cortonwood colliery in South Yorkshire after it was announced that the pit was to be closed along with nineteen others across Britain. Arthur Scargill, the leader of the NUM, decided to use the ...

Coiling in Anarchy

Rosemary Hill: Top of the Lighthouse, 16 February 2023

Where Light in Darkness Lies: The Story of the Lighthouse 
by Veronica della Dora.
Reaktion, 280 pp., £25, March 2022, 978 1 78914 549 6
Show More
Show More
... I meant nothing by the lighthouse,’ Virginia Woolf said of the novel she published in 1927. ‘I trusted that people would make it the deposit for their own emotions.’ To the Lighthouse, her fifth novel, outsold the previous four and readers have been depositing or discovering their emotions in it ever since ...

You can’t prove I meant X

Clare Bucknell, 16 April 2020

Poetics of the Pillory: English Literature and Seditious Libel, 1660-1820 
by Thomas Keymer.
Oxford, 352 pp., £25, October 2019, 978 0 19 874449 8
Show More
Show More
... never do much harm among those who had not three shillings to spare,’ Pitt is reported to have said. The men who had most to gain from the idea that subjects should judge the value of political institutions for themselves would never be able to afford Godwin’s book.If the Enquiry concerning Political Justice didn’t count as sedition, what did? When the ...

Scoop after Scoop

Ian Jack: Chapman Pincher’s Scoops, 5 June 2014

Dangerous to Know: A Life 
by Chapman Pincher.
Biteback, 386 pp., £20, February 2014, 978 1 84954 651 5
Show More
Show More
... right simile here, because sometimes he was lunching judges) and tried to remember everything they said. Taking notes was out of the question: ‘nothing would be more likely to cause an informant to clam up.’ He was happy to be recognised as ‘the Lone Wolf of Fleet Street’ and to spurn friendship with colleagues and rivals. His personality had a ...

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