Search Results

Advanced Search

1126 to 1140 of 1595 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Prodigious Powers

Hugh Lloyd-Jones, 21 January 1982

The Greeks and their Heritages 
by Arnold Toynbee.
Oxford, 334 pp., £12.50, October 1981, 0 19 215256 4
Show More
Show More
... to see that the archaising revival of Greek culture in the second century AD had some things to be said for it: the writers of the Second Sophistic are lively compared with the Byzantine imitators of the Classics. Toynbee has some interesting things to say about the Byzantine period, remarking on what the Byzantines called their oikonomia, their ability to ...
From Bauhaus to Our House 
by Tom Wolfe.
Cape, 143 pp., £6.95, March 1982, 0 224 02030 7
Show More
Show More
... the ideal of the pure ‘Yale Box’, and in that measure they get kid-glove treatment too. Thus Edward Durell Stone, designer of the pretty little Huntington Hartford Museum and the lacery-tracery US Embassy for New Delhi, is excused exactly the kind of sneering heaped on Wolfe’s villains. With unbelievable innocence (or dissimulation?), he attributes the ...

Misbehavin’

Susannah Clapp, 23 July 1987

A Life with Alan: The Diary of A.J.P. Taylor’s Wife, Eva, from 1978 to 1985 
by Eva Haraszti Taylor.
Hamish Hamilton, 250 pp., £14.95, June 1987, 0 241 12118 3
Show More
The Painted Banquet: My Life and Loves 
by Jocelyn Rickards.
Weidenfeld, 172 pp., £14.95, May 1987, 0 297 79119 2
Show More
The Beaverbrook Girl 
by Janet Aitken Kidd.
Collins, 240 pp., £12.95, May 1987, 0 00 217602 5
Show More
Show More
... is to Lord Longford, whom she presses into drying the dinner dishes: ‘Frank looked pale ... He said he would note it in his diary.’ She is convivial and an eager recorder of conversations. Talk she considers ‘frivolous’ can be redeemed by the production of a new fact. When the Boothbys come to dinner they discuss Baldwin and his lover Mrs ...

Echoes from the Far Side

James Sheehan: The European Age, 19 October 2017

The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914 
by Richard J. Evans.
Penguin, 848 pp., £12.99, June 2017, 978 0 14 198114 7
Show More
Show More
... of letter-writers: as well as extraordinary correspondents like Alexander von Humboldt, who is said to have written more than fifty thousand letters in his long life, millions of ordinary individuals could now send one another messages easily and economically. The British postal service delivered 564 million letters in 1860 and 2.3 billion in 1900. And ...

No More Baubles

Tom Johnson: Post-Plague Consumption, 22 September 2022

Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London: Consumption and Domesticity after the Plague 
by Katherine L. French.
Pennsylvania, 314 pp., £52, October 2021, 978 0 8122 5305 4
Show More
Show More
... wont to wear every day’. The wording suggests that the clerk stayed close to what Bayly actually said, showing a respect for her precise wishes. Joan Kent, who had outlived three husbands when she made her will in 1487, gave her son John his father’s silver girdle and a gilt cup that had belonged to his godmother. She warned him to be ‘therewith ...

Hurrah for the Dredge

Richard Hamblyn: The ocean floor, 3 November 2005

Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea 
by Helen Rozwadowski.
Harvard, 276 pp., £16.95, April 2005, 0 674 01691 2
Show More
Show More
... what is the organisation of these animals, we can scarcely conjecture.’ Much the same could be said today, 140 years on from the voyage of the Nautilus, with less than 5 per cent of the world’s 320 million cubic miles of ocean having so far been explored, and an estimated 50 million unknown species thriving in its depths. Like space exploration, a branch ...

Farewell Sovereignty

Stephen Sedley: The Case for the Regicides, 9 February 2006

The Tyrannicide Brief: The Story of the Man who Sent Charles I to the Scaffold 
by Geoffrey Robertson.
Chatto, 429 pp., £20, October 2005, 0 7011 7602 4
Show More
Show More
... of the land and not otherwise’ – a proposition which had enraged Charles’s father when Sir Edward Coke, one of his chief justices, had advanced it early in the century. It concluded with the impeachment of Charles ‘as a tyrant, traitor, murderer and a public and implacable enemy to the Commonwealth of England’. Westminster Hall was cleared of its ...

No Tricks

Frank Kermode: Raymond Carver, 19 October 2000

Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Prose 
by Raymond Carver.
Harvill, 300 pp., £15, July 2000, 1 86046 759 8
Show More
Show More
... pictured on the jacket of this book, on which the photograph powerfully, inevitably, alludes to Edward Hopper. Whatever is going to happen around here is likely to be depressing: possibly just a marital argument, more seriously a fire in a neighbour’s house or the death of a child. Such happiness as can be expected must be looked for on fishing trips, and ...

Diary

Katherine Arcement: Fanfic, 7 March 2013

... warned ‘Mature Readers Only!!’ I felt less guilty: the words were a flashing neon sign that said ‘read me.’ Whatever fantasy you can’t act out in real life can be fulfilled in fan fiction. May-December relationships are very popular, as are boys transforming into girls. BDSM has a huge following. But the most common sexual ‘perversion’ is gay ...

Rough Wooing

Michael Brown: Flodden, 23 January 2014

Fatal Rivalry: Flodden 1513 
by George Goodwin.
Weidenfeld, 288 pp., £20, July 2013, 978 0 297 86739 5
Show More
Show More
... regarded the battle as a psychological turning point in Scotland’s history. Flodden, it’s said, undermined the confidence of the country’s rulers and governing classes in the ability of their small realm to play a role in Europe, most obviously as a counterweight to England. James IV is seen as having been forced into invasion and battle by the ...

Properly Disposed

Emily Witt: ‘Moby-Duck’, 30 August 2012

Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea 
by Donovan Hohn.
Union, 402 pp., £8.99, September 2012, 978 1 908526 02 1
Show More
Show More
... we insist on its ‘proper disposal’. Hohn’s ideas are more or less in tune with those of Edward Abbey: in his 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, a Vietnam vet called Hayduke wages guerrilla war on landscape-blighting public works projects but defiantly drops litter along the highways he hates. A few decades later it’s the polluter-sponsored ...

The Thought of Ruislip

E.S. Turner: The Metropolitan Line, 2 December 2004

Metro-Land: British Empire Exhibition Number 
by Oliver Green.
Southbank, 144 pp., £16.99, July 2004, 1 904915 00 0
Show More
Show More
... where ‘jaded vitality and taxed nerves’ were soothed away by pure air, and (as a song said) hearts were lighter and eyes were brighter. For a decade and a half the image of Metroland was vigorously promoted, but in 1933 the Metropolitan Railway – which in 1863 had been the world’s first underground railway, linking Paddington and Farringdon ...

In an Empty Church

Peter Howarth: R.S. Thomas, 26 April 2007

The Man who Went into the West: The Life of R.S. Thomas 
by Byron Rogers.
Aurum, 326 pp., £16.99, June 2006, 1 84513 146 0
Show More
Show More
... distance standing in for Thomas’s own incapacity to relate to those who needed him: Father, I said, domesticating an enigma, and as though to humour me you came. But there are precipices Within you. (‘The Echoes Return Slow’) The current archbishop of Canterbury has politely referred to this as a Kierkegaardian theology of ‘post-ethical divine ...

Era of Wonders

Eric Hobsbawm: Mandarin Science, 26 February 2009

Bomb, Book and Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China 
by Simon Winchester.
Viking, 316 pp., £20, September 2008, 978 0 670 91379 4
Show More
Show More
... was in the gift of the strongly socialist Countess of Warwick (who also doubled for a time as King Edward VII’s mistress), had been supplied with a revolutionary socialist priest, Conrad Noel. In the course of time Needham modulated from Anglicanism, which he knew to be a local phenomenon (‘because I happened to be born in the European West in 1900, and ...

Goose Girl

Josephine Quinn: Empress Theodora, 4 May 2017

Theodora: Actress, Empress, Saint 
by David Potter.
Oxford, 277 pp., £17.99, January 2016, 978 0 19 974076 5
Show More
Show More
... sources corroborate Procopius’ account: even Theodora’s fellow Miaphysite John of Ephesus said that she came ‘from the brothel’ (porneion), and Potter’s argument that the word could have referred simply to her past as an actress is too generous. There are other things Procopius could not possibly have known, and some he simply made up, though he ...

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