Search Results

Advanced Search

91 to 105 of 152 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Nutty Professors

Hal Foster: ‘Lingua Franca’, 8 May 2003

Quick Studies: The Best of ‘Lingua Franca’ 
edited by Alexander Star.
Farrar, Straus, 514 pp., $18, September 2002, 0 374 52863 2
Show More
Show More
... Star declares here, and his collection offers helpful accounts of influential thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Benedict Anderson and the radical-turned-Neo-Conservative historian Eugene Genovese, as well as thoughtful reviews of significant debates, such as the contested legacy of Darwin (Stephen Jay Gould v. sociobiology), the stake of revisionist ...

Summer Simmer

Tom Vanderbilt: Chicago heatwaves, 22 August 2002

Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago 
by Eric Klinenberg.
Chicago, 305 pp., £19.50, August 2002, 0 226 44321 3
Show More
Show More
... than in a typical week for that month.’ The city was wholly unprepared for the disaster: Mayor Richard Daley was out of town, and returned to a fully fledged health emergency; the generators of the electricity conglomerate Commonwealth Edison malfunctioned owing to the extra demand; city hospitals and morgues were overwhelmed by the crush of heat-stress ...

Consider Jack and Oskar

Michael Rossi: Twin Studies, 7 February 2013

Born Together – Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study 
by Nancy Segal.
Harvard, 410 pp., £39.95, June 2012, 978 0 674 05546 9
Show More
Show More
... in the name of objective science. The cycle was repeated in 1994 with the publication of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve, which extended Jensen’s basic thesis into a 900-page exposition of the genetic bases of social inequality, crime, poverty and unemployment. In the meantime, a re-examination of Cyril Burt’s work in ...

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
... did write at least one good poem, how many of us can say that?’ Fitzgerald wrote to Richard Ollard at Collins, who was pessimistic about the prospects for a biography. At odds with the ineffectualness of Fitzgerald’s self-portrait is the passionate determination with which she pursued her subjects, wooing the recalcitrant owners of private ...

I lerne song

Tom Shippey: Medieval schooling, 22 February 2007

Medieval Schools: From Roman Britain to Renaissance England 
by Nicholas Orme.
Yale, 430 pp., £25, June 2006, 0 300 11102 9
Show More
Show More
... the poor in any case. In 1391, ten years after the Peasants’ Revolt, the House of Commons asked Richard II to forbid serfs from sending their children to school, in order to ‘save the honour of all freemen of the realm’ (the king did nothing about it). Whatever his connections with the Peasants’ Revolt itself, the curiously cross-grained author of ...

The day starts now

Eleanor Birne: On holiday with Ali Smith, 23 June 2005

The Accidental 
by Ali Smith.
Hamish Hamilton, 306 pp., £14.99, May 2005, 0 241 14190 7
Show More
Show More
... by HarperCollins. Eve’s irritating editor, Amanda Farley-Brown, is crossing her fingers that Richard and Judy will feature a Genuine. But Eve is blocked, unable to begin work on the next book, and has decamped to a holiday house in Norfolk for a change of scene and to get away from dead people’s relations, taking her husband and two children with ...

Trickes of the Clergye

Alexandra Walsham: Atheistical Thoughts, 25 April 2024

Atheists and Atheism before the Enlightenment: The English and Scottish Experience 
by Michael Hunter.
Cambridge, 223 pp., £30, July 2023, 978 1 009 26877 6
Show More
Show More
... constituted a growing proportion of the population and why the eminent Presbyterian Richard Baxter was convinced that a large proportion of those ‘born of Christian Parents’ had ‘banished’ faith from their ‘Hearts and Lives’. Often described as ‘worldlings’, these were people who denied God less in thoughts and words than in ...

The Pleasures of Poverty

Barbara Everett, 6 September 1984

A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Letters and Diaries 
by Barbara Pym, edited by Hazel Holt and Hilary Pym.
Macmillan, 320 pp., £12.95, July 1984, 0 333 34995 4
Show More
Show More
... penetrating and suggestive and even briefer account of these earlier novels in /v02/n04/karl-miller/barbara-pyms-hymn in the London Review of Books. Even such admirable essays as these have, however, one curious limitation. They don’t quite suggest a writer who has such difficulties as met Barbara Pym during her literary career, and even less of course ...

‘A Naughty House’

Charles Nicholl: Shakespeare’s Landlord, 24 June 2010

... were all 3 in bed together wth her at one tyme’. The other half of the bail is posted by one Richard Meade, also of St Giles parish, whose occupation is given as ‘gardiner’. A few days later the procedure is repeated, and two other men stand surety for the fourth defendant, ‘ffrancisca Williams de whitechappell, spinster’. The designation ...

Frognal Days

Zachary Leader: Files on the Fifties, 4 June 1998

Previous Convictions: A Journey Through the Fifties 
by Nora Sayre.
Rutgers, 464 pp., £27.95, April 1997, 0 8135 2231 5
Show More
Show More
... the left-wing filmmakers Joseph Losey, Carl Foreman and Abraham Polonsky, the screenwriters Richard Collins, Ring Lardner Jr and Waldo Salt, the critics Harold Clurman and Ken Tynan, the musicians Larry Adler and Yip Harburg, as well as Ingrid Bergman, Constance Cummings and Katharine Hepburn. Most of the expatriate film people Sayre met in Frognal had ...

Diary

Edward Said: My Encounter with Sartre, 1 June 2000

... the cable was a joke of some sort. It might just as well have been an invitation from Cosima and Richard Wagner to come to Bayreuth, or from T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to spend an afternoon at the offices of the Dial. It took me about two days to ascertain from various friends in New York and Paris that it was indeed genuine, and far less time than that ...

Soul to Soul

Ian Buruma, 19 February 1987

The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness 
by Peter Dale.
Croom Helm, 233 pp., £25, September 1987, 0 7099 0899 7
Show More
Show More
... beween living national languages, like German, and dead languages like French. Fichte, a kind of Richard Wagner of linguistics, rejected such Latinate words as Humanität, Popularität, Liberalität, spread by the effete French and their revolution. Instead, he believed in coining vigorous, native words, expressing the living German soul. Watanabe makes the ...

Friends

Eugene Goodheart, 16 March 1989

The company we keep: An Ethics of Fiction 
by Wayne Booth.
California, 485 pp., $29.55, November 1988, 0 520 06203 5
Show More
Show More
... of moral critics like F.R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling virtually disappeared in the Sixties. Richard Rorty speaks of ‘the current struggle in American literary circles between ... old-fashioned storytelling novelists and ironist critics’ as ‘a symptom of the inability of intellectuals to take such novels seriously as moral testimonies’. If one ...

You are the we of me

Joyce Carol Oates: The Autobiography of Carson McCullers, 2 September 1999

Illumination and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers 
edited by Carlos Dews.
Wisconsin, 256 pp., £19.95, September 1999, 0 299 16440 3
Show More
Show More
... Williams, a fellow Southerner, ‘lonely hunter’ and drinker; W.H. Auden; Edith Sitwell; Henry Miller; Janet Flanner; Richard Wright, who praised McCullers for her complex, realistic portraits of Negroes; the American composer David Diamond, who had a triangular love affair with McCullers and Reeves that ended unhappily ...

We did and we didn’t

Seamus Perry: Are yez civilised?, 6 May 2021

On Seamus Heaney 
by R.F. Foster.
Princeton, 228 pp., £14.99, September 2020, 978 0 691 17437 2
Show More
Show More
... which the book’s Irish reviewers weren’t slow to point out. In an enlightened spirit, Richard Murphy thought the point was that Ireland might be encouraged to shake off such atavism, the book freed ‘us from the myth by portraying it in its true archaic shape and colour, not disguising its brutality’. Other reviewers took the opposite ...

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