Search Results

Advanced Search

121 to 135 of 172 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Ruck in the Carpet

Glen Newey: Political Morality, 9 July 2009

Philosophy and Real Politics 
by Raymond Geuss.
Princeton, 116 pp., £11.95, October 2008, 978 0 691 13788 9
Show More
Show More
... Mark Antony, the patrician with the gift of the gab who sells the plebs down the river in Julius Caesar; similarly, the role of ‘Tony Blair’, played by the actor of the same name. Writing in Die Zeit (14 June 2007), Geuss cited Blair’s catch-all answer to intelligence and military advisers who knew far more about the situation on the ground ...

Saint Shakespeare

Barbara Everett, 19 August 2010

... extreme sophistication of a play which has no kind, but can hold and move its audience entirely. Julius Caesar, coldly clear-cut and sonorous, reddens its black and white Roman world with the fountain of blood at its secret centre. And then there is Hamlet. Hamlet is too large to include in a list: it crowned and summarised everything Shakespeare wrote ...

In such a Labyrinth

Jonathan Rée: Hume, 17 December 2015

Hume: An Intellectual Biography 
by James Harris.
Cambridge, 621 pp., £35, September 2015, 978 0 521 83725 5
Show More
Show More
... histories that coalesced over a decade into a six-volume History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688 that sold in vast quantities. He took uncomplicated pleasure in his fame and commercial success, and by the time of his death in 1776 at the age of 65 he prided himself on being ‘not only independent, but ...

What does a chicken know of bombs?

David Thomson: A Key to Brando, 5 December 2019

The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando 
by William J. Mann.
HarperCollins, 718 pp., £22, November 2019, 978 0 06 242764 9
Show More
Show More
... or James Tyrone. His one shot at Shakespeare was as Antony in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film of Julius Caesar (1953), where he amazed many doubters and impressed John Gielgud (his Cassius), by handling the verse as easily as he had muttered and snarled in Streetcar and The Wild One. But he did make movies, like Désirée, Teahouse of the August ...

Diary

Michael Dobson: Shakespeare’s Grotto, 5 October 2023

... Abbey statue of Shakespeare, even contributing a prologue for the benefit performance of Julius Caesar that the countess organised in 1738. When the family gave up their holdings in Barbados, however, is less clear, and the sale of their interest in Carolina is unlikely to have been an exercise in disinvestment motivated by abolitionism. The 4th ...

Writing about Shakespeare

Frank Kermode, 9 December 1999

... in obscurity. A few quotations roughly suggest the stages by which this development occurred. In Julius Caesar, one of the first Globe plays as well as a play with deep political interests, Brutus has to decide whether to join the conspiracy against Caesar. So here is a man thinking about something we take to be ...

Not for Horrid Profs

Colin Burrow: Kermode’s Shakespeare, 1 June 2000

Shakespeare's Language 
by Frank Kermode.
Allen Lane, 324 pp., £20, April 2000, 0 7139 9378 2
Show More
Show More
... they are early and relatively unimportant (although Henry V was probably written only just before Julius Caesar). Kermode suggests that the prison scene at the end of Richard II marks a stage in the emergence of characters who think in verse, and shows ‘signs of a language formidably changing to meet greater challenges’, and that in Henry IV ...

Public Works

David Norbrook, 5 June 1986

The Faber Book of Political Verse 
edited by Tom Paulin.
Faber, 481 pp., £17.50, May 1986, 0 571 13947 7
Show More
Show More
... many conservative texts by foregrounding, rather than eliding, the debates. Paulin concedes that Julius Caesar may reveal a ‘closet republicanism’. These two plays alone show that there was a far more sophisticated awareness of republican institutions in Renaissance England than many critics, and historians, have conceded. Ben Jonson’s Roman ...

Funny Mummy

E.S. Turner, 2 December 1982

The Penguin Stephen Leacock 
by Robertson Davies.
Penguin, 527 pp., £2.95, October 1981, 0 14 005890 7
Show More
Jerome K. Jerome: A Critical Biography 
by Joseph Connolly.
Orbis, 208 pp., £7.95, August 1982, 0 85613 349 3
Show More
Three Men in a Boat 
by Jerome K. Jerome, annotated and introduced by Christopher Matthew and Benny Green.
Joseph, 192 pp., £12.50, August 1982, 0 907516 08 4
Show More
The Lost Stories of W.S. Gilbert 
edited by Peter Haining.
Robson, 255 pp., £7.95, September 1982, 0 86051 200 2
Show More
Show More
... of effort’, there were strings of leading questions ‘something like this’: Q. Did not Julius Caesar invade Britain? A. He did. Q. Was it not in the year 55 BC? A. It was. Q. Was he later assassinated in Rome? A. He was. Q. Did not his friend Brutus take a part in assassinating him? A. He did. It sounds crazy, yet rings a ...

Nationalising English

Patrick Parrinder, 28 January 1993

The Great Betrayal: Memoirs of a Life in Education 
by Brian Cox.
Chapmans, 386 pp., £17.99, September 1992, 1 85592 605 9
Show More
Show More
... in England and Wales would be tested on one of three Shakespeare plays – Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Later it emerged that all that most pupils will face is a test based on extracts of verse and prose in a 45-page anthology which has just been published. Meanwhile Mr Patten, who has no powers to control ...

Drain the Swamps

Steven Shapin, 4 June 2020

The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator 
by Timothy Winegard.
Text, 300 pp., £12.99, September 2019, 978 1 911231 12 7
Show More
Show More
... certain symptomatic patterns and outcomes. Shakespeare and his audiences were familiar with agues. Julius Caesar greets one of the plotters with the assurance that he was ‘ne’re so much your enemy/As that ague which hath made you lean’, and Caliban, shaking and shivering, is thought to be ‘some monster of the isle with four legs, who hath got, as ...

Seven Centuries Too Late

Barbara Newman: Popes in Hell, 15 July 2021

Dante’s Bones: How a Poet Invented Italy 
by Guy Raffa.
Harvard, 370 pp., £28.95, May 2020, 978 0 674 98083 9
Show More
Poetry in Dialogue in the Duecento and Dante 
by David Bowe.
Oxford, 225 pp., £60, November 2020, 978 0 19 884957 5
Show More
Dante’s Christian Ethics: Purgatory and Its Moral Contexts 
by George Corbett.
Cambridge, 233 pp., £75, March 2020, 978 1 108 48941 6
Show More
Why Dante Matters: An Intelligent Person’s Guide 
by John Took.
Bloomsbury, 207 pp., £20, October 2020, 978 1 4729 5103 8
Show More
Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio: Literature, Doctrine, Reality 
by Zygmunt Barański.
Legenda, 658 pp., £75, February 2020, 978 1 78188 879 7
Show More
Show More
... philosophers, the physicians Hippocrates and Galen, the Amazons Camilla and Penthesilia, Aeneas, Julius Caesar, the sultan Saladin, and others renowned for their wisdom or courage. Virgil himself, consigned to the same realm, explains that together ‘sanza speme vivemo in disio’ – ‘we live in desire without hope.’Virgil’s​ damnation has ...

Hard Eggs and Radishes

Thomas Jones: Shelley at Sea, 21 July 2022

The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Vol. VII 
edited by Nora Crook.
Johns Hopkins, 931 pp., £103.50, May 2021, 978 1 4214 3783 5
Show More
Show More
... Great), Kant, Catherine (the Great), Plato, Alexander (the Great), Aristotle, Roman emperors from Julius Caesar to Constantine, ‘the Anarchs old’ – before describing ‘how and by what paths I have been brought/To this dread pass’.One spring morning, Rousseau found himself ‘asleep/Under a mountain’ beside a ‘gentle rivulet’ when a ...

A Pound a Glimpse

Daniel Smith: Epilepsy, 16 November 2017

A Smell of Burning: The Story of Epilepsy 
by Colin Grant.
Cape, 242 pp., £16.99, August 2016, 978 0 224 10182 0
Show More
The End of Epilepsy? A History of the Modern Era of Epilepsy, 1860-2010 
by Dieter Schmidt and Simon Shorvon.
Oxford, 208 pp., £39.99, September 2016, 978 0 19 872590 9
Show More
Show More
... like St Paul, Joan of Arc and Van Gogh, may or may not have had epilepsy, and some of whom, like Julius Caesar, Dostoevsky and Harriet Tubman, almost certainly did. He also keeps vigil over his brother, determined ‘to discover what it was that marked him with epilepsy’ – how he had been changed by the condition and what it was that made him ...

Glimpsed in the Glare

Michael Neill: Shakespeare in 1606, 17 December 2015

1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear 
by James Shapiro.
Faber, 423 pp., £20, October 2015, 978 0 571 23578 0
Show More
Show More
... detail takes the place of the speculatively personal. If 1599 – when Shakespeare wrote Henry V, Julius Caesar and As You Like It, as well as beginning Hamlet – was ‘the most decisive year of his career, one in which he redefined himself and his theatre’, that transformation could be understood only in relation to the year’s turbulent ...

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