Francis Wyndham talks about himself to Alan Hollinghurst

Francis Wyndham, 4 August 1988

“... very nice. I was then called senior editor. The other day I went to see James Fox, who had the French edition of White Mischief, which I come into. He’d put originally that Francis Wyndham, one of the senior editors, wanted Cyril Connolly to write something, and I immediately looked myself up and it said: ‘Francis Wyndham, un des rédacteurs les plus ...”

The Finchley Factor

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Thatcher in Israel, 13 September 2018

Margaret Thatcher and the Middle East 
by Azriel Bermant.
Cambridge, 274 pp., £22.99, September 2017, 978 1 316 60630 8Show More
Show More
“... who had by then returned to office as foreign secretary in the wartime coalition government led by David Lloyd George. The British government would ‘view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object’. Although there was realpolitik behind ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... south of the border, and this raises two big questions at least. What would have happened had David Cameron not foolishly refused to include a third, ‘devo-max’ option on the ballot? And, whatever the result, will political self-interest and the need to survive finally begin to push the UK’s two so-called main parties in the direction of localism ...”

Our Slaves Are Black

Nicholas Guyatt: Theories of Slavery, 4 October 2007

Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World 
by David Brion Davis.
Oxford, 440 pp., £17.99, May 2006, 0 19 514073 7Show More
The Trader, the Owner, the Slave 
by James Walvin.
Cape, 297 pp., £17.99, March 2007, 978 0 224 06144 5Show More
The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000 
by Colin Kidd.
Cambridge, 309 pp., £16.99, September 2006, 0 521 79324 6Show More
The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview 
by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese.
Cambridge, 828 pp., £18.99, December 2005, 0 521 85065 7Show More
Show More
“... rise of antislavery in Britain and America coincide with an intensification of racial thinking? David Brion Davis’s Inhuman Bondage throws light on the process by which slavery became exclusively black. There were many European precedents for white slavery, not only in the classical period but in the trading networks of the late medieval ...”

The Suitcase: Part Two

Frances Stonor Saunders, 13 August 2020

“... in English to understand the text, so Joe translates it into German:The essential points of the French system, which was carried out on a gigantic scale, are as follows: a line of fortified casemates giving each other mutual protection by crossfire, and interconnected by underground galleries safe from bombardment. All the key positions, normally vulnerable ...”

What Europeans Talk about when They Talk about Brexit

LRB Contributors: On Brexit, 3 January 2019

“... our trees and houses, have longer histories than our country. My family home in Bouillon, on the French border, is decked with photographs of relatives who were born before Belgium was created. There are wooden clogs under the stairs that are older than Belgium. My family is working-class and post-industrial: Walloon first, European second and Belgian ...”

Post-Modernism and the Law

Robert Post, 21 February 1991

Languages of Law: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks 
by Peter Goodrich.
Weidenfeld, 353 pp., £30, August 1990, 0 297 82024 9Show More
Post-Modern Law: Enlightenment, Revolution and the Death of Man 
edited by Anthony Carty.
Edinburgh, 166 pp., £25, August 1990, 0 7486 0156 2Show More
Show More
“... more rigorous and living languages’. In his last chapter, a fascinating discussion of the art of David Walliker, he makes it plain that meaningful law is impossible because under contemporary conditions of ‘ultra-modernity’ the authority required by such a law cannot exist. Instead we have only ‘the social forms of human absence’ arranged within ...”

Progress Past

Paul Langford, 8 November 1990

The Idea of Progress in 18th-Century Britain 
by David Spadafora.
Yale, 464 pp., £22.50, July 1990, 0 300 04671 5Show More
George III and the Satirists from Hogarth to Byron 
by Vincent Carretta.
Georgia, 389 pp., £38.50, June 1990, 0 8203 1146 4Show More
Show More
“... part in installing it as the pre-eminent value of the West. Whether this is entirely fair to the French is a very moot point. Whether, in any event, it is cause for self-congratulation, as the author plainly assumes, is still more dubious; some readers might find the heartening scepticism of the Philosophes more appealing than the curious combination of ...”

Fashville

Robert Tashman, 9 March 1995

Prêt-à-Porter 
directed by Robert Altman.
Show More
Show More
“... seems to decide for the former. Kitty, after her final inane broadcast, passes her microphone to a French assistant who has been sneering at her, and who, though she has never broadcast before, is effortlessly eloquent and interesting when she does. Throughout Prêt-à-Porter Altman undermines or suppresses specific meanings or statements of intent. In an ...”

School of Hard Knocks

Peter Campbell, 2 December 1993

The Materials of Sculpture 
by Nicholas Penny.
Yale, 318 pp., £35, November 1993, 0 300 05556 0Show More
Show More
“... piece. The Blessed Stanislas Kostka was commissioned in 1702 by the Jesuits in Rome from the French sculptor Pierre Legros to promote the veneration of a pious Polish novice. He is represented lying on his deathbed wearing a robe of black Belgian marble. His face, hands and pillows are of white Carrara marble, the mattress is yellow marble and the cover ...”

Questions of Dutchness

Svetlana Alpers, 4 August 1994

Dawn of the Golden Age: Northern Netherlandish Art, 1580-1620 
by Wouter Kloek, translated by Michael Hoyle.
Yale, 720 pp., £60, January 1994, 0 300 06016 5Show More
Show More
“... government. This was not, then, a self-conscious, nation-building revolution like the American and French ones that followed. Again with reverberations in our time, the northern Netherlands was an asylum land, taking in many and diverse immigrants – among them, the rush of refugees who came north from Antwerp in the 1580s. It was tolerant, but the price for ...”

What time is it?

Michael Wood, 16 February 1989

Dreams of Roses and Fire 
by Eyvind Johnson, translated by Erik Friis.
Dedalus, 384 pp., £11.95, December 1988, 0 946626 40 5Show More
Women in a River Landscape 
by Heinrich Böll, translated by David McLintock.
Secker, 208 pp., £10.95, February 1989, 0 436 05460 4Show More
The Standard Life of a Temporary Pantyhose Salesman 
by Aldo Busi, translated by Raymond Rosenthal.
Faber, 430 pp., £12.95, January 1989, 0 571 14657 0Show More
Show More
“... The demons were born of an unholy alliance between the nuns’ repression and certain twists in French politics. The exorcists got the nuns to confess whatever was needed, and in 1634 Grandier was tortured – the tortures are described by Johnson in casual, hairraising detail – and then burned. This priest is one of the central figures in Johnson’s ...”

How Tudjman won the war

Misha Glenny, 4 January 1996

The Death of Yugoslavia 
by Allan Little and Laura Silber.
Penguin, 400 pp., £6.99, September 1995, 0 14 024904 4Show More
Show More
“... In constitutional terms, this is nothing if not innovative. General Nash and his British and French counterparts are charged with creating a stable security climate to allow the civilian authorities, under the guidance of the EU mediator Carl Bildt, to establish the new constitutional order in Bosnia. A literal interpretation of Dayton means that ...”

Leave it to the teachers

Conrad Russell, 20 March 1997

“... the training colleges, may serve for an example; and finally direct intervention, as symbolised by David Blunkett’s threat (Independent on Sunday, 23 February) to ‘lay down from the centre exactly how reading should be taught’. Hobbes would have known what to call this: it is ‘a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, which ceaseth only in ...”

Upward Mobility

Bruce Boucher, 31 March 1988

Venetian Villas 
by Michelangelo Muraro.
Rizzoli, 514 pp., $85, January 1987, 0 8478 0762 2Show More
Picturing Art in Antwerp, 1550-1700 
by Zirka Zaremba Filipczak.
Princeton, 247 pp., £37.60, February 1988, 0 691 04047 8Show More
The Painful Birth of the Art Book 
by Francis Haskell.
Thames and Hudson, 64 pp., £5.95, February 1988, 0 500 55019 0Show More
Show More
“... part of the century. Filipczak draws attention to the career of another upwardly-mobile painter, David Teniers II, who fashioned a variant of the gallery picture at mid-century: shells, scientific instruments and so on are jettisoned in favour of works of art placed in an environment reminiscent of a modern picture collection, a constcamer. This change of ...”
Show more articles