Search Results

Advanced Search

1 to 15 of 19 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Doing something

Ahdaf Soueif, 1 October 1987

Persian Nights 
by Diane Johnson.
Chatto, 352 pp., £10.95, July 1987, 0 7011 3234 5
Show More
Smile, and Other Stories 
by Deborah Moggach.
Viking, 175 pp., £10.95, September 1987, 0 670 81658 2
Show More
Fast Lanes 
by Jayne Anne Phillips.
Faber, 148 pp., £8.95, August 1987, 0 571 14924 3
Show More
Show More
... is, of course, where a great deal of the humour in writing about foreign places comes from – and Diane Johnson uses it to good effect. When Chloe finds herself in a bathroom with her Iranian friend Noosheen, she is amazed to find that she had no pubic hair. Chloe tried not to stare but it did make a person look strange, statue-like. She could not tell ...

Among the quilters

Peter Campbell, 21 March 1991

Asya 
by Michael Ignatieff.
Chatto, 313 pp., £13.99, February 1991, 0 7011 3509 3
Show More
Health and Happiness 
by Diane Johnson.
Chatto, 260 pp., £13.99, January 1991, 0 7011 3597 2
Show More
Happenstance 
by Carol Shields.
Fourth Estate, 388 pp., £13.99, March 1991, 1 872180 08 6
Show More
Show More
... junior medical staff) a matter for low comedy and a little tactical blackmail, but not high drama. Diane Johnson has struck the right form for modern medical fiction. What other structure could so well show how modern medicine, while it has been unable to remove death from the wards, has so scrambled the traditional ending that the deathbed scene is now a ...

Such a Husband

John Bayley, 4 September 1997

Selected Letters of George Meredith 
edited by Mohammad Shaheen.
Macmillan, 312 pp., £47.50, April 1997, 0 333 56349 2
Show More
Show More
... if not entirely refuting, the domestic image of Meredith’s marriage to Mary Peacock concocted by Diane Johnson in her True History of the First Mrs Meredith. In a spirited way, and with a good deal of apparent justification, Diane Johnson signed up Peacock’s daughter in the league of clever persecuted women ...

Gangsters in Hats

Richard Mayne, 17 May 1984

Essays on Detective Fiction 
edited by Bernard Benstock.
Macmillan, 218 pp., £20, February 1984, 0 333 32195 2
Show More
Dashiell Hammett: A Life at the Edge 
by William Nolan.
Arthur Barker, 276 pp., £9.95, September 1983, 0 213 16886 3
Show More
The Life of Dashiell Hammett 
by Diane Johnson.
Chatto, 344 pp., £12.95, January 1984, 9780701127664
Show More
Hellman in Hollywood 
by Bernard Dick.
Associated University Presses, 183 pp., £14.95, September 1983, 0 8386 3140 1
Show More
Show More
... He abandoned his wife and children, with cruel intermittent heartlessness well documented by Diane Johnson. Most of his life he was promiscuous, a dissatisfied solitary whose books made women killers. He had problems with his father. In The Glass Key – but not, pace Ms Johnson, in Red Harvest – a father kills ...

A Parlour in Purley

Tessa Hadley: Life as a Wife, 17 June 2021

The True History of the First Mrs Meredith and Other Lesser Lives 
by Diane Johnson.
NYRB, 242 pp., £14.99, July 2020, 978 1 68137 445 1
Show More
Show More
... not ungenerously – and providing yet another plausible case of a wife abused by posterity. When Diane Johnson was writing about Mary Ellen Meredith, who died aged forty in 1861, that history was still close enough for her to touch the tail of its reality. The Preface to the reprint begins:I found Mary Ellen Meredith’s letters to her lover Henry ...

English Changing

Frank Kermode, 7 February 1980

The State of the Language 
edited by Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks.
California, 609 pp., £14.95, January 1980, 0 520 03763 4
Show More
Show More
... End (1910), and discovered that the mistaken association with ‘mean’ was old enough for Johnson to record it in his Dictionary. Now the wrong usage is right, and mine is obsolete, as the ‘right’ sense of jejune, and the ‘correct’ homogeneous, may be in a hundred years or less. I am saying, half-heartedly conservative, that some resistance is ...

Who whom?

Christopher Ricks, 6 June 1985

The English Language Today 
edited by Sidney Greenbaum.
Pergamon, 345 pp., £12.50, December 1984, 0 08 031078 8
Show More
The English Language 
by Robert Burchfield.
Oxford, 194 pp., £9.50, January 1985, 9780192191731
Show More
A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language 
by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik.
Longman, 1779 pp., £39.50, May 1985, 0 582 51734 6
Show More
Words 
by John Silverlight.
Macmillan, 107 pp., £17.50, May 1985, 9780333380109
Show More
Faux Amis and Key Words: A Dictionary-Guide to French Language, Culture and Society through Lookalikes and Confusables 
by Philip Thody, Howard Evans and Gwilym Rees.
Athlone, 224 pp., £16, February 1985, 0 485 11243 4
Show More
Puns 
by Walter Redfern.
Blackwell, 234 pp., £14.95, October 1984, 0 631 13793 9
Show More
Fair of Speech: The Uses of Euphemism 
edited by D.J. Enright.
Oxford, 222 pp., £9.95, April 1985, 0 19 212236 3
Show More
Show More
... in the 18th and 19th-century novel; and she points out that ‘maidenhead’ was a euphemism. Diane Johnson and John Murray, on doctors and their proper self-protection, mention ‘consumption’. And John Gross, in a finely judged and moving essay on ‘Intimations of Mortality’, offers a grim humane reminder that some, still, of the uses of ...

Stay Home, Stay Stoned

Andrea Brady: Diane di Prima, 10 March 2022

Revolutionary Letters: Fiftieth Anniversary Edition 
by Diane di Prima.
City Lights, 213 pp., £13.99, September 2021, 978 0 9957162 6 1
Show More
Show More
... The laws of hospitality are older than the laws of the United States of America!’ Diane di Prima shouted at the FBI agents who came to her cold-water apartment in Manhattan in 1956, looking for a young dissident writer from Yugoslavia. It was her first encounter with ‘the Big Reality that had undone so much of Hollywood, of New York ...

Against Whales

Paul Keegan, 20 July 1995

The Moon by Whale Light 
by Diane Ackerman.
Phoenix, 260 pp., £6.99, May 1994, 1 85799 087 0
Show More
The Last Panda 
by George Schaller.
Chicago, 292 pp., $13.95, May 1993, 0 226 73629 6
Show More
The Great Ape Project 
edited by Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer.
Fourth Estate, 312 pp., £9.99, June 1993, 1 85702 126 6
Show More
Show More
... Moreover, there has been a hybridising of science writers, nature journalists, writer-scientists. Diane Ackerman and George Schaller are representative of either end of an increasingly blurred spectrum. The lengthy reports gathered in The Moon by Whale Light (‘and Other Adventures among Bats, Penguins, Crocodilians and Whales’) were written for the New ...

Marquess Untrussed

Malcolm Gaskill: The Siege of Basing House, 30 March 2023

The Siege of Loyalty House: A Civil War Story 
by Jessie Childs.
Vintage, 318 pp., £12.99, May, 978 1 78470 209 0
Show More
Show More
... besieged. News and supplies were delivered. Guests arrived, notably the botanist Thomas Johnson, the engraver William Faithorne and the elderly architect Inigo Jones. There was a wedding. Spies came and went. Deserters were caught and hanged. A plot to betray the house was uncovered. Then, early in 1644, the massing of Royalist forces around ...

Labour and the Lobbyists

Peter Geoghegan, 15 August 2024

... the chair of the BBC board arranging an £800,000 loan for Starmer, as Richard Sharp did for Johnson. But speaking to people within Labour you get the sense that the party often doesn’t recognise the tension between private interests and public office, especially when those involved are what one person described as ‘members of the Labour ...

Diary

Susan McKay: Pro-­Union Non­-Unionists, 4 March 2021

... Theresa May’s minority government after the 2017 election, had been forgotten. When Boris Johnson, at that point on the back benches, attended the DUP’s annual conference in 2018, he said what he knew the party wanted to hear. A border in the Irish Sea would turn Northern Ireland into an ‘economic semi-colony of the EU’ and damage the ...

Illustrating America

Peter Campbell, 21 March 1985

Willem de Kooning: Drawings, Paintings, Sculpture 
by Paul Cummings, Jorn Merkert and Claire Stoullig.
Norton, 308 pp., £35, August 1984, 0 393 01840 7
Show More
Abstract Expressionist Painting in America 
by William Seitz.
Harvard, 490 pp., £59.95, February 1984, 0 674 00215 6
Show More
About Rothko 
by Dore Ashton.
Oxford, 225 pp., £15, August 1984, 0 19 503348 5
Show More
The Art of the City: Views and Versions of New York 
by Peter Conrad.
Oxford, 329 pp., £15, June 1984, 0 19 503408 2
Show More
Show More
... art galleries apart, was there a natural home for them? In 1958, when Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson’s Seagram Building went up, it seemed that there was. The Abstract Expressionists, who, in the Forties, could see themselves as an embattled avant-garde, were out of their cold-water lofts, and taking on the status of giants and heroes. Pollock was ...

Imperial Graveyard

Samuel Moyn: Richard Holbrooke, 6 February 2020

Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century 
by George Packer.
Cape, 592 pp., £25, May 2019, 978 1 910702 92 5
Show More
Show More
... of the post-Vietnam moment was to find a middle way between the hard militarism of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, both of whom believed they could bomb their way to victory, and the peace agenda of the Democrat George McGovern, whose dramatic failure in the 1972 presidential election convinced Holbrooke – and his future patrons the Clintons and ...

Reviewers

Marilyn Butler, 22 January 1981

Three-Quarter Face 
by Penelope Gilliatt.
Secker, 295 pp., £7.95, September 1980, 9780436179587
Show More
Show People 
by Kenneth Tynan.
Weidenfeld, 317 pp., £8.95, October 1980, 0 297 77842 0
Show More
When the lights go down 
by Pauline Kael.
Boyars, 592 pp., £8.95, August 1980, 0 7145 2726 2
Show More
Show More
... of Mencken, not to mention Svetonius’s Lives of the Caesars; and into the garbage goes Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, perhaps the finest book of profile-essays ever written ... I am not, of course, claiming a place for myself among the masters I have named above. (Although, when Lamb is at his most whimsical, I sometimes think I could go a couple ...

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