Search Results

Advanced Search

1 to 15 of 55 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Ill-Suited to Reality

Tom Stevenson: Nato’s Delusions, 1 August 2024

Nato: From Cold War to Ukraine, a History of the World’s Most Powerful Alliance 
by Sten Rynning.
Yale, 345 pp., £20, March, 978 0 300 27011 2
Show More
Deterring Armageddon: A Biography of Nato 
by Peter Apps.
Wildfire, 624 pp., £25, February, 978 1 0354 0575 6
Show More
Natopolitanism: The Atlantic Alliance since the Cold War 
edited by Grey Anderson.
Verso, 356 pp., £19.99, July 2023, 978 1 80429 237 2
Show More
Show More
... a collection of essays and leaked documents revealing less celebrated aspects of Nato’s history, Grey Anderson argues that even during the Cold War the alliance was never principally a mutual defence pact. Particularly in the early years, ‘European leaders looked to Nato as a bulwark against internal subversion as much as against the Red ...

Little Grey Cells

J. Robert Lennon: More Marple than Poirot, 5 March 2020

Big Sky 
by Kate Atkinson.
Black Swan, 356 pp., £8.99, January, 978 0 552 77666 0
Show More
Show More
... fiction and understands how an investigation is supposed to unfold. ‘Time to regroup the little grey cells,’ Atkinson has him tell himself after a setback. ‘He tipped an invisible hat in Poirot’s direction. Jackson preferred the Belgian to Miss Marple. He was straightforward, where Miss Marple was endlessly devious.’ Unfortunately for him, his ...

Two Men in a Boat

Ian Aitken, 15 August 1991

John Major: The Making of the Prime Minister 
by Bruce Anderson.
Fourth Estate, 324 pp., £16.99, June 1991, 9781872180540
Show More
‘My Style of Government’: The Thatcher Years 
by Nicholas Ridley.
Hutchinson, 275 pp., £16.99, July 1991, 0 09 175051 2
Show More
Show More
... Winston Churchill through the greatest world war in human history, while John Major isn’t just a grey man with very little public persona – he is a man with extraordinarily little experience beyond his trainee stints at DHSS, the Foreign Office and the Treasury, following a single term as a councillor in Lambeth. Even by the standards of a government which ...

So it must be for ever

Thomas Meaney: American Foreign Policy, 14 July 2016

American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers 
by Perry Anderson.
Verso, 244 pp., £14.99, March 2014, 978 1 78168 667 6
Show More
A Sense of Power: The Roots of America’s Global Role 
by John A. Thompson.
Cornell, 343 pp., £19.95, October 2015, 978 0 8014 4789 1
Show More
A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s 
by Daniel J. Sargent.
Oxford, 369 pp., £23.49, January 2015, 978 0 19 539547 1
Show More
Show More
... from colonial rule into statehood, or in the case of some American holdings, towards a convenient grey zone between colony and military base. In this utopia the US was to be at once the summa of world history, never to be equalled, and the model that would have to be followed. The planners drafted blueprints for the United Nations as a way to package ...

What would socialism be like?

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 1 March 1984

In the Tracks of Historical Materialism 
by Perry Anderson.
Verso, 112 pp., £4.95, November 1983, 0 86091 776 2
Show More
The Dialectics of Disaster 
by Ronald Aronson.
Verso, 329 pp., £5.95, February 1984, 9780860910756
Show More
Rethinking Socialism 
by Gavin Kitching.
Methuen, 178 pp., £3.95, October 1983, 0 416 35840 3
Show More
The Economics of Feasible Socialism 
by Alec Nove.
Allen and Unwin, 244 pp., £12.95, February 1983, 0 04 335048 8
Show More
The Labour Party in Crisis 
by Paul Whiteley.
Methuen, 253 pp., £12.50, November 1983, 0 416 33860 7
Show More
Show More
... economy to alleviate waste and disorder. But he did actually say. Few others have. In Perry Anderson’s view, Marxists have been ceasing to do so since the Bolshevik coup in 1917. Ever since the 1880s, they had understandably been more exercised about how to escape from capitalism than about what to do once they had. Lenin’s success and the ...

Diary

Perry Anderson: On E.P. Thompson, 21 October 1993

... sudden movement of the flat of his hand to his head – smiting his brow or stroking his shock of grey hair? – whose effect always hovered between the histrionic and the playful. Afterwards, as we went off to an official supper, an incongruous quartet, something of the same trick of perception as when I first knew him recurred. The youngest of the three ...

Desperately Seeking Susan

Terry Castle: Remembering Susan Sontag, 17 March 2005

... that Peter Hujar took of her in the 1970s, around the time of I, Et Cetera. She’s wearing a thin grey turtleneck and lies on her back – arms up, head resting on her clasped hands and her gaze fixed impassively on something to the right of the frame. There’s a slightly pedantic quality to the whole thing which I like: very true to life. Every few hours ...

It’s a Knock-Out

Tom Nairn, 27 May 1993

The Spirit of the Age: An Account of Our Times 
by David Selbourne.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 388 pp., £20, February 1993, 1 85619 204 0
Show More
Show More
... proceeding in that way might also be tempted to give up. For the heart of darkness is curiously grey. To write this tract Selbourne has turned self-consciously to his Jewish roots, notably those of the prophetic tradition. Yet the thunder, when finally delivered after grieving foreplay of incredible duration and intensity, amounts to little more than a ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘The Taking of Pelham One Two Three’, 6 August 2009

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three 
directed by Tony Scott.
Show More
Show More
... the same sort of false moustache. They are called, we soon learn, Mr Blue, Mr Green, Mr Brown, Mr Grey – possibly not their real names, but a touch of criminal style Tarantino certainly borrowed for Reservoir Dogs. The caper in both films involves the hijacking of a New York subway train heading south into Manhattan from Pelham Bay Park. The 123, I learn ...

A Belated Encounter

Perry Anderson: My father’s career in the Chinese Customs Service, 30 July 1998

... father. He had punished the wrong son. The institution in which the young James Carew O’Gorman Anderson took up his post in 1914 had been in existence for nearly fifty years. By then it had no parallel anywhere in the world. Its origins lay in the crisis of the Ch’ing Empire in the mid-19th century, when the Taiping Rebellion gave a Western ...

Karel Reisz Remembered

LRB Contributors, 12 December 2002

... a teacher and a writer for film journals, one of which, Sequence, he co-founded with Lindsay Anderson and Gavin Lambert. Along with Anderson and Tony Richardson, Reisz aimed to bring a version of auteurism to British film, and they did as much with the documentary movement Free Cinema. In 1959, Reisz directed We Are ...

Fog has no memory

Jonathan Meades: Postwar Colour(lessness), 19 July 2018

The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Postwar Britain 
by Lynda Nead.
Yale, 416 pp., £35, October 2017, 978 0 300 21460 4
Show More
Show More
... British equivalent of the theorist André Bazin. British film studies were still in utero. Lindsay Anderson and Gavin Lambert didn’t start the student magazine Sequence till a year after Great Expectations appeared. Anderson, it goes without saying, despised David Lean. Another energetic hater, Wyndham Lewis, wrote of ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Fresh Revelations, 20 October 1994

... 13 January. Having supper in the National Theatre restaurant are Lindsay Anderson and Gavin Lambert. ‘I suppose you like this place,’ says Lindsay. I do, actually, as the food is now very good. I say so and Lindsay, who judges all restaurants by the standard of the Cosmo in Finchley Road, smiles wearily, pleased to be reassured about one’s moral decline ...

Lumpers v. Splitters

Lorraine Daston: The Weather Watchers, 3 November 2005

Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology 
by Katharine Anderson.
Chicago, 331 pp., £31.50, July 2005, 0 226 01968 3
Show More
Show More
... complicity in the genesis of a scientific theory he detested. But it is more likely, as Katharine Anderson suggests in her engaging and enlightening study of Victorian meteorology, that the depressive Fitzroy was pushed over the edge by a quite different scientific controversy. Could the weather, and more particularly storms, be predicted? As a seaman and a ...

A Ripple of the Polonaise

Perry Anderson: Work of the Nineties, 25 November 1999

History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Despatches from Europe in the Nineties 
by Timothy Garton Ash.
Allen Lane, 441 pp., £20, June 1999, 0 7139 9323 5
Show More
Show More
... of Waugh is a violent declaration of distance between the two species. I disapproved of his grey suede shoes, his floppy bow tie and the excessive width of his trousers; he struck me as flaccid and petulant and I disliked him on sight. Later he asked me, at second hand, if he could accompany me into the Danakil country, where I planned to travel. I ...

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