Search Results

“... you turned round and looked behind you. Palm Island may be bigger than Primrose Hill, but I think London Zoo would spill over into the sea if it was moved here. Mostly, what the handful of people staying here do is lie breathtakingly still in the sun and watch big white boats with tall triangular sails go by – very likely to somewhere else. There’s ...”

“... put it on Twitter, Doom was a ‘Black universal citizen’, ‘the story of Diaspora’. Born in London to a Trinidadian mother and Zimbabwean father, he grew up in New York, but never became a US citizen. His influence reverberates through a class of indie rappers and producers – Earl Sweatshirt, Bishop Nehru, Tierra Whack – who work outside the big ...”

“... of the decline of the Roman Empire and also of the heyday of Edwardian England as described by Jack London in People of the Abyss, establish gluttony as the mark of a class on the rise. The Official Foodie Handbook notes: ‘It takes several things to support a Foodie culture: high-class shops, fast transport bringing fresh produce from the ...”

“... increasingly mid-Atlantic, Thirties drawl was hard to hear above the din of the Angry Young Men in London and the Wild Men of New York (novelists who stabbed their wives in the stomach). As a screenwriter, Isherwood has credits on The Great Sinner (a Dostoevsky biopic), a vehicle for Shirley Temple, and a treatment of Carson McCullers’s Reflections in a ...”

“... In Jones’s direct and percussive style we might expect to find echoes of the boxing heroes of Jack London or Hemingway. But Jones’s youths, caught up in their inchoate ambition, aren’t influenced by Hemingway’s stale, cheek-by-jowl prizefighters. The naturalism of London’s embryonic boxing novel, The ...”

“... all the important US novelists writing at the turn of the century can be contained within it: Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin. McElrath and Crisler, however, claim that the naturalist novel has been slighted by scholars in favour of the realist. This was true when they began writing their ...”

“... I don’t know what it means,’ or ‘I don’t know much about books but I read this story by Jack London’ (the Catcher in the Rye trick). In the third-person stories symbolism is introduced by other means. When a practising alcoholic has trouble with his ear we nod wisely (loss of equilibrium, can’t hear the outside world – get it?). When the ...”

“... none of whom Amis had much time for), as well as extensive collections of Stevenson and Jack London, the latter represented by 131,000 items. It has also purchased the archive of the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, Amis’s second wife. The Huntington’s Rare Book Room closes for an hour at noon and most of its readers stroll across the ...”

“... time, at the end of his tether, in a city of the near future with a hallucinatory resemblance to London. The decisive influence on this grisly dystopia is surely the grand master of all dystopias, William Burroughs. Jack Kerouac, asked for a quote for the jacket of The Naked Lunch, said it was an endless novel that would ...”

“... in an appropriate style. She climbed laboriously up to a small ‘chamber’ – it was the Jack London room – in one of the mansion’s towers where, among a plethora of nautical bric-à-brac, she found, on the bedside table, her crustacean muse. Rodney, of course, was long dead inside the mollusc shell that served as his hermitage, but encased ...”

“... the time this issue of the LRB is read, to have been abbreviated to 7/7, even if the atrocity in London proved a lot less horrific in its consequences than 9/11. Thursday being this paper’s day for going to press, I’d written for ‘Short Cuts’ a few hundred mildly disobliging words about London’s having been ...”

“... with mould’. This mould turns out to be Transylvanian earth: Dracula has shipped the boxes to London to serve as graves in which to replenish his strength on his arrival. We already know, from Jonathan Harker’s diary, that the count sleeps in a coffin. The ship’s first mate, convinced that ‘It’ must lie in one of the crates, starts to unscrew them ...”

“... to another. Allen Ginsberg selected the correspondence that became The Yage Letters. Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac put Naked Lunch together from drastic-looking clumps of torn, coffee-stained fragments; the book’s final sequence was determined by the order in which proof pages arrived back from the printer. Outtakes and overflow from Naked Lunch, supplemented ...”

“... the brass band, the council estate, the corner shop, each one as emblematic as the Union Jack and the London bus. The German-born photographer Evelyn Hofer came to London in the early 1960s to make a series of portraits of the city and its people for V.S. Pritchett’s book ...”

“... shore. Kerouac’s friend/hero/obsession Neal Cassady was found dead there on a railroad track. Jack London did not last more than a couple of years after getting dysentery, and perpetually drunk, in Mexico. Malcolm Lowry, of course, boiled his head there for years, and made the Mexican Day of the Dead immortal. It was in Mexico, too, that Tom Bootman ...”