Search Results

Advanced Search

1321 to 1335 of 1981 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Name the days

Marina Warner: Holy Spirits, 4 February 2021

Angels & Saints 
by Eliot Weinberger.
Norton, 159 pp., £21.99, September 2020, 978 0 8112 2986 9
Show More
Show More
... and biographies of remarkable singularity. The subjects range from the familiar to the unknown, and in date from Thecla, Paul’s disciple in the first century, to modern exemplars such as Thérèse of Lisieux, whose relics were taken into space and back, and continue to tour the world, as well as Edvige Carboni, who was declared venerable in ...

This Guilty Land

Eric Foner: Every Possible Lincoln, 17 December 2020

Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times 
by David S. Reynolds.
Penguin, 1066 pp., £33.69, September, 978 1 59420 604 7
Show More
The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln and the Struggle for American Freedom 
by H.W. Brands.
Doubleday, 445 pp., £24, October, 978 0 385 54400 9
Show More
Show More
... not be able to discover significant new material about Lincoln – a diary, say, or previously unknown speeches and letters. Instead the biographer must take an original interpretative approach. And, against all odds, Reynolds, who teaches at the City University of New York, manages to say new and important things about Lincoln in his elegantly written ...

A Platter of Turnips

Esther Chadwick: Rembrandt’s Neighbours, 7 January 2021

Black in Rembrandt’s Time 
edited by Elmer Kolfin and Epco Runia.
WBooks, 135 pp., £20, April 2020, 978 94 6258 372 6
Show More
Show More
... projects in recent years. To refuse to accept as adequate the silences, or at best the words ‘unknown servant’, in the titles of so many European portraits that show black and brown figures alongside white, is to insist on the concrete relationships that produced such images and, in so doing, to begin to reckon with the histories of racialised injustice ...

Syria Alone

Patrick Cockburn, 5 November 2020

... two months. A colleague in my office lost her cousin last month because he was kidnapped by an unknown group who called her family and asked for 15 million Syrian pounds as a ransom’ – about $6000 – ‘but the family didn’t have the money to pay. He was found dead on the outskirts of a village in the Latakia countryside on the way to Hama.’ As ...

Human Origami

Adam Mars-Jones: Four-Dimensional Hinton, 4 March 2021

Hinton 
by Mark Blacklock.
Granta, 290 pp., £8.99, April, 978 1 78378 521 6
Show More
Show More
... went their different ways; Eric drops out of the historical record, his date and place of death unknown. In Blacklock’s version Eric becomes a gambler and a speculator during the Gold Rush, which makes him a rebellious reflection of the eldest brother, George, a mining engineer. It is the third son, William, who has the furthest to fall. When Sebastian ...

Utopia in Texas

Glen Newey: Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’, 19 January 2017

Utopia 
by Thomas More, edited by George M. Logan, translated by Robert M. Adams.
Cambridge, 141 pp., £9.99, August 2016, 978 1 107 56873 0
Show More
Utopia 
by Thomas More, translated by Gilbert Burnet.
Verso, 216 pp., £8.99, November 2016, 978 1 78478 760 8
Show More
Show More
... travel books, and an explanation of why the island’s latitude and longitude co-ordinates were unknown. The mock-up extends to idiom – then, as now, travel writing was purple, and More plays this game adeptly. Some of the details suggest that life in More’s Utopia, like many others inspired by it, isn’t much fun. As Ralph Robinson’s English version ...

Lives of Reilly

Thomas Jones, 10 August 2023

Sidney Reilly: Master Spy 
by Benny Morris.
Yale, 190 pp., £16.99, January, 978 0 300 24826 5
Show More
Show More
... to be treated for alcoholism. Reilly began a relationship with a woman called Anne (surname unknown, possibly a colleague). He left Port Arthur at the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. Anne may have gone with him (they may even have got married) but she soon drops out of view and he’s making his peripatetic, priapic way back to Paris, via ...

Like a Washed Corpse

Jenny Turner: Fleur Jaeggy’s Method, 27 July 2023

The Water Statues 
by Fleur Jaeggy, translated by Gini Alhadeff.
And Other Stories, 93 pp., £10.99, May 2022, 978 1 913505 44 8
Show More
Show More
... mess of all those intertangled working-class families, the ‘dissolving margins’ and the ‘unknown entities that broke down the outline of the world’; the huge, sloppy ethical and political questions, the incontinent, unseemly splurge of all those enormous books. As early as The Water Statues, Jaeggy could be bothered with none of it: ‘Such ...

Positively Spaced Out

Rosemary Hill: ‘The Building of England’, 6 September 2001

The Buildings of England: A Celebration Compiled to Mark 50 Years of the Pevsner Architectural Guides 
edited by Simon Bradley and Bridget Cherry.
Penguin Collectors’ Society, 128 pp., £9.99, July 2001, 0 9527401 3 3
Show More
Show More
... Hopkins’s St Eadburga’s, Worcester. The use of negatives is sparing but effective. ‘Widely unknown’ (describing a minor architect) is one of the best.By the end of the project Pevsner felt that he was too tired and the writing just ‘scribble, scribble, scribble. If only one could be proud of the result.’ In fact, the prose never went slack or ...

Poland after PiS

Jan-Werner Müller, 16 November 2023

The New Politics of Poland: A Case of Post-Traumatic Sovereignty 
by Jarosław Kuisz.
Manchester, 344 pp., £20, November, 978 1 5261 5587 0
Show More
Show More
... he did. Without much conviction, PiS had nominated as its candidate Andrzej Duda, a relatively unknown lawyer. He turned out to be a natural campaigner and an effective conduit for unhappiness with the government. Civic Platform had presided over uninterrupted economic growth, but it was weakened after its popular leader, Donald Tusk, left to take up the ...

Water on the Brain

Dinah Birch: Spurious Ghosts, 30 November 2023

‘The Virgin of the Seven Daggers’ and Other Stories 
by Vernon Lee, edited by Aaron Worth.
Oxford, 352 pp., £7.99, September 2022, 978 0 19 883754 1
Show More
Show More
... Dionea sails away into the Mediterranean sunlight ‘in a Greek boat … singing words in an unknown tongue, the white pigeons circling around her’. Pater counted Lee as a disciple, but she had her own point to make about female sovereignty.‘Oke of Okehurst’ is, unusually among these stories, set in England. Alice Oke, like Trepka, has been fatally ...

How did she get those feet?

Alice Spawls: The Female Detective, 20 February 2014

The Notting Hill Mystery: The First Detective Novel 
by Charles Warren Adams.
British Library, 312 pp., £8.99, February 2012, 978 0 7123 5859 0
Show More
The Female Detective: The Original Lady Detective 
by Andrew Forrester.
British Library, 328 pp., £8.99, October 2012, 978 0 7123 5878 1
Show More
Revelations of a Lady Detective 
by William Stephens Hayward.
British Library, 278 pp., £8.99, February 2013, 978 0 7123 5896 5
Show More
Show More
... a detective: independent, impatient with trivialities, logical, and orderly to a fault. In ‘The Unknown Weapon’, the most complex of the stories, she has to solve an especially knotty murder. Graham Petleigh, the destitute son of a miserly squire is found dead outside his father’s country house. What and where is the murder weapon? Why was a large black ...
Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of the ‘New Yorker’ 
by Thomas Kunkel.
Random House, 497 pp., $25, March 1995, 0 679 41837 7
Show More
Show More
... Kaufman, Harpo Marx, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker and the others were in their twenties and unknown. But they were wits, albeit at each other’s expense much of the time, and Ross watched with interest from the sidelines, every so often giving out ‘teamsterlike snorts’ of appreciation or ‘explosive, left-field interjections’. Several of the ...

From Its Myriad Tips

Francis Gooding: Mushroom Brain, 20 May 2021

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures 
by Merlin Sheldrake.
Bodley Head, 368 pp., £20, September 2020, 978 1 84792 519 0
Show More
Show More
... the other one: it appears to ‘possess a directional memory, although the basis of this memory is unknown’.‘Solving mazes and complex routing problems are non-trivial exercises,’ Sheldrake writes. ‘This is why mazes have long been used to assess the problem-solving abilities of many organisms, from octopuses to bees to humans.’ Fungi ace these ...

Diary

Rebecca Solnit: In the Day of the Postman, 29 August 2013

... The sound quality was usually good. On them people had long, deep conversations of a sort almost unknown today, now that phones are used while driving, while shopping, while walking in front of cars against the light and into fountains. The general assumption was that when you were on the phone that’s all you were. Letters morphed into emails, and for 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