Search Results

Advanced Search

16 to 30 of 94 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

You are the we of me

Joyce Carol Oates: The Autobiography of Carson McCullers, 2 September 1999

Illumination and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers 
edited by Carlos Dews.
Wisconsin, 256 pp., £19.95, September 1999, 0 299 16440 3
Show More
Show More
... parable-like stories were favourites in the influential Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Awards yearly anthologies. If American Southern Gothic survives as a literary mode, it’s only as parody. The reputations of McCullers and Capote have severely diminished even as the reputation of O’Connor has steadily risen. McCullers may be perceived ...

Like a row of books by Faber

Peter Porter, 22 January 1987

Other Passports: Poems 1958-1985 
by Clive James.
Cape, 221 pp., £9.95, November 1986, 0 224 02422 1
Show More
Show More
... The James who stated that the modern equivalent of a Donatello statue is not something by Henry Moore but a drop-head Lamborghini was only exaggerating a dearly held truth: that the idea of Two Cultures is as silly a notion today as it would have been when Donatello and Brunelleschi were working in Florence. To the rationalism of the Movement, Clive ...

Wild Enthusiasts

Bernard Porter: Science in Africa, 10 May 2012

Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870-1950 
by Helen Tilley.
Chicago, 496 pp., £18.50, April 2011, 978 0 226 80347 0
Show More
Show More
... category, a relatively small and diminishing one. Their most prominent representative here is Dr Henry Laing Gordon, an amateur psychologist and early champion of IQ testing, who claimed to have discovered that only Africans given ‘some kind of European education’ exhibited ‘the mental affliction known as dementia praecox’, or schizophrenia; which ...

Unlike Kafka

Amit Chaudhuri, 8 June 1995

The Unconsoled 
by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Faber, 535 pp., £15.99, May 1995, 9780571173877
Show More
Show More
... embodied in the relations between servants and employers in, for instance, La Règle du jeu, Henry Green’s Loving, in Wodehouse’s writing or Upstairs, Downstairs. In The Unconsoled, the themes of guilt and fear of humiliation persist, as do the means of negotiating them: excessive, insincere flattery, elisions, voluntary or involuntary amnesia. But ...

Prinney, Boney, Boot

Roy Porter, 20 March 1986

The English Satirical Print 1600-1832 
edited by Michael Duffy.
Chadwyck-Healey, February 1986
Show More
Show More
... Cruikshank, like Giorgione, could be read on many different planes, just as a cartoon featuring Henry Fox and labelled ‘Volpone’ could be appreciated by those who had never heard of Ben Jonson. Yet if cartoons assuredly were not ‘high art’, they certainly must not be seen as part of the ‘little tradition’. Cartoons were an expression of that ...

Oh, My Aching Back

Roy Porter, 2 November 1995

The History of Pain 
by Roselyne Rey, translated by Elliott Wallace and J.A. Cadden , and S.W. Cadden.
Harvard, 394 pp., £25.50, October 1995, 0 674 39967 6
Show More
Show More
... which involved severing nerve fibres, a string of ingenious investigators from Pierre Flourens to Henry Head and Charles Sherrington laid bare the central nervous system’s intricate mechanisms. By 1900, the sensory-motor alterations which, it had long been known, could be effected by severing spinal nerve roots, were being produced by slicing segments off ...

Where is this England?

Bernard Porter: The Opium War, 3 November 2011

The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China 
by Julia Lovell.
Picador, 458 pp., £25, September 2011, 978 0 330 45747 7
Show More
Show More
... You could blame the Chinese, as many Chinese themselves did. ‘If your people are virtuous,’ Henry Pottinger, the most unbending of Britain’s agents in China, claimed, ‘they will desist from the evil practice; and if your officers are incorruptible, and obey their orders, no opium can enter your country. The discouragement of the growth of the poppy ...

F for Felon

Roy Porter, 4 April 2002

Policing and Punishment in London 1660-1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror 
by J.M. Beattie.
Oxford, 491 pp., £48, July 2001, 0 19 820867 7
Show More
Show More
... Bow Street Runners, London’s first semi-public agency geared to bringing miscreants to book, by Henry Fielding and his blind half-brother John. The most innovative sections of this study involve analysis of the workings of criminal law in the court house and attempts to reform it. Beattie has discovered that, at the Restoration, surprisingly little of all ...

Trying to Make Decolonisation Look Good

Bernard Porter: The End of Empire, 2 August 2007

Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation, 1918-68 
by Ronald Hyam.
Cambridge, 464 pp., £17.99, February 2007, 978 0 521 68555 9
Show More
The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire 
by Peter Clarke.
Allen Lane, 559 pp., August 2007, 978 0 7139 9830 6
Show More
Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain’s Asian Empire 
by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper.
Allen Lane, 673 pp., £30, January 2007, 978 0 7139 9782 8
Show More
Show More
... army captain (later Dirk Bogarde) recalled, on his arrival in Calcutta in 1945, seeing an Indian porter being beaten by ‘a fat, ginger-haired, moustached, red-faced stocky little major … Screaming. Thrashing at the cringing Indian with his swagger cane … My first sight and sound of the Raj at work.’ Apparently, little had changed. Assaults on women ...

Blood Running Down

Helen Cooper: Iconoclasm and theatre in early modern England, 9 August 2001

The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theatre in Early Modern England 
by Michael O'Connell.
Oxford, 198 pp., £30, February 2000, 9780195132052
Show More
Show More
... the stage must present a single place. There should be no subplots, no mingling of genres, no porter in Macbeth nor gravediggers in Hamlet nor a king in Love’s Labour’s Lost, and no Winter’s Tale at all. Those Roman dramatists conformed very nicely to the model. Seneca’s armchair violence was familiar to every schoolboy. But that was not what the ...

Dear Miss Boothby

Margaret Anne Doody, 5 November 1992

The Letters of Samuel Johnson: Vol. I: 1731-1772, Vol. II: 1773-1776, Vol. III: 1777-1781 
edited by Bruce Redford.
Oxford, 431 pp., £25, February 1992, 0 19 811287 4
Show More
Show More
... and whose life history was intertwined with his. It would be helpful to have explanations of Lucy Porter, Hill Boothby, John Taylor and the Thrales, as major figures in Johnson’s life and letter-writing. The notes are self-referential in a cryptic way, with a delicately archaic use of ante and post; these are not as helpful as the editor thinks, for the ...

Chattering Stony Names

Nicholas Penny: Painting in Marble, 20 May 2021

Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the Enlightenment 
by Fabio Barry.
Yale, 438 pp., £50, October 2020, 978 0 300 24816 6
Show More
Show More
... used in English medieval architecture and sculpture is also a limestone. Barry notes that Master Henry of Avranches, the cosmopolitan 13th-century Latin poet and secular priest, likened Purbeck stone to the shining jasper mentioned in the Bible, and to the sheen of a fingernail (an allusion, I suppose, to onyx, the name of which derives directly from the ...

Robin’s Hoods

Patrick Wormald, 5 May 1983

Robin Hood 
by J.C. Holt.
Thames and Hudson, 208 pp., £8.95, May 1982, 0 500 25081 2
Show More
The Early History of Glastonbury: An Edition, Translation and Study of William of Malmesbury’s ‘De Antiquitate Glastonie Ecclesie’ 
by John Scott.
Boydell, 224 pp., £25, January 1982, 9780851151540
Show More
Megalithomania 
by John Michell.
Thames and Hudson, 168 pp., £8.50, March 1982, 9780500012611
Show More
Show More
... years ago by Joseph Hunter, who spotted a Robert Hood at Wakefield in 1316-17 and a ‘Robyn Hode, porter’ in the royal chamber in 1324. Since the Gest envisages a tour of the North by ‘Edwarde, our comly kynge’ as the context of Robin’s pardon and entry into royal service, and since Edward II is known to have made such a tour in 1323, the pieces ...

Possessed by the Idols

Steven Shapin: Does Medicine Work?, 30 November 2006

Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates 
by David Wootton.
Oxford, 304 pp., £16.99, June 2006, 0 19 280355 7
Show More
Show More
... to ignore that progress or been duped into denying it. Wootton’s target of choice is Roy Porter, who wrote that ‘only the most dyed-in-the-wool Whig history still polarises the past in terms of confrontations between saints and sinners, heroes and villains.’ Wootton is happy to acknowledge that his book ‘is written against the grain of ...

Did he puff his crimes to please a bloodthirsty readership?

Bernard Porter: How bad was Stanley?, 5 April 2007

Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer 
by Tim Jeal.
Faber, 570 pp., £25, March 2007, 978 0 571 22102 8
Show More
Show More
... for an unlikely reputation to rescue, reputations don’t come much unlikelier than that of Henry Morton Stanley. Widely excoriated in his own time as one of the most brutal of African travellers, condemned by historians for his part in the creation of King Leopold II’s Congo Free State, and derided both then and since for his famous but ...

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