Search Results

Advanced Search

16 to 30 of 70 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Beautiful People

Jonathan Coe, 23 July 1992

Brightness Falls 
by Jay McInerney.
Bloomsbury, 416 pp., £15.99, May 1992, 0 7475 1152 7
Show More
The Lost Father 
by Mona Simpson.
Faber, 506 pp., £14.99, May 1992, 0 571 16149 9
Show More
Out with the Stars 
by James Purdy.
Peter Owen, 192 pp., £14.99, June 1992, 0 7206 0861 9
Show More
Show More
... weightiness, but this creates formal problems for both writers. Although by the end of Mona Simpson’s novel we are in no doubt as to the seriousness of her themes or her genuine gift for plot, a huge amount of the surface texture of her book is taken up with the kind of homespun detail and domestic minutiae which we associate with the American ...

Seen through the Loopholes

David Simpson: ‘War at a Distance’, 11 March 2010

War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime 
by Mary Favret.
Princeton, 262 pp., £18.95, January 2010, 978 0 691 14407 8
Show More
Show More
... and all the way forward to the 20th-century image of the nuclear winter. Favret finds in James Thomson’s The Seasons and in Cowper and other poets a newly heightened sense of winter as the figure proper to modern war. The fall of snow is like the effect of massively destructive weapons; like death it serves, in Cowper’s words, to ‘assimilate ...

Pseudo-Travellers

Ian Gilmour and David Gilmour, 7 February 1985

From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict 
by Joan Peters.
Joseph, 601 pp., £15, February 1985, 0 7181 2528 2
Show More
Show More
... his discovery that there were only 1,440 Jews in all of Palestine is not mentioned. The Reverend James Parkes is cited many times, but his evidence that the Jewish population of Jerusalem was less than a thousand in 1827, or that it formed only a third of its inhabitants by mid-century, is left out.For all her ‘bald facts’, Peters only manages to prove ...

Stop screaming, Mrs Steiner

Wendy Steiner, 17 December 1992

The American way of Birth 
by Jessica Mitford.
Gollancz, 237 pp., £16.99, October 1992, 0 575 05430 1
Show More
Show More
... would not have been so shy. Another harrowing story concerns a 19th-century American doctor, James Marion Sims, who was dubbed the ‘Architect of the Vagina’. Because only the poorest women gave birth in hospitals before the 20th century, physicians found in the wards a ready supply of powerless subjects for experimentation. Sims used black slaves and ...

Standing on the Wharf, Weeping

Greg Dening: Australia, 25 September 2003

The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia 
by John Gascoigne.
Cambridge, 233 pp., £45, September 2002, 0 521 80343 8
Show More
Looking for Blackfella’s Point: An Australian History of Place 
by Mark McKenna.
New South Wales, 268 pp., £14.50, August 2002, 0 86840 644 9
Show More
Words for Country: Landscape and Language in Australia 
by Tim Bonyhady and Tom Griffiths.
New South Wales, 253 pp., £15.50, October 2001, 0 86840 628 7
Show More
The Land Is a Map: Placenames of Indigenous Origin in Australia 
edited by Luise Hercus, Flavia Hodges and Jane Simpson.
Pandanus, 304 pp., AUS $39.95, October 2002, 1 74076 020 4
Show More
Show More
... were put on the Memory of the World Register (the list of documentary heritage launched in 1997): James Cook’s journal of the Endeavour, written in his own hand; and the Edward Koiki Mabo Papers, the record of Eddie Mabo’s landmark case before the High Court, which gave legal recognition to the fact that indigenous land ownership existed before European ...

In the Sorting Office

James Meek, 28 April 2011

... TNT,’ Leijten said. ‘The postal system is sick.’ On the eve of my journey to Holland, David Simpson, the earnest Ulsterman who is Royal Mail’s chief spokesman, took me to one of the facilities the company is most proud of, the Gatwick mail centre in Sussex. Despite its name, it has nothing to do with the nearby airport. It’s a giant mail processing ...

Naming the Dead

David Simpson: The politics of commemoration, 15 November 2001

... pages put out by the same newspaper on 15 April 1998, in response to the box-office success of James Cameron’s film. The large print captions are devoted to the ‘notable passengers’ and ‘noted men’ on board the ship, and there are extended quasi-obituaries of many of them. But the Times also made an effort to record the names of all the missing ...

Presto!

James Buchan, 14 December 1995

The Life of Adam Smith 
by Ian Simpson Ross.
Oxford, 495 pp., £25, October 1995, 0 19 828821 2
Show More
Show More
... In Book IV of The Wealth of Nations, a vantage at which you have already left the economists shivering and huddled in their sleeping bags a thousand feet below, there is a sentence that lets you peer right into Adam Smith’s world. He is talking about Cameron of Lochiel, whose decision, against his better judgment, to come out for Prince Charles Edward Stuart in 1745 won the clans for the Pretender and doomed the ancient culture of the Highlands to extinction ...

At which Englishman’s speech does English terminate?

Henry Hitchings: The ‘OED’, 7 March 2013

Words of the World: A Global History of the ‘Oxford English Dictionary’ 
by Sarah Ogilvie.
Cambridge, 241 pp., £17.99, November 2012, 978 1 107 60569 5
Show More
Show More
... sources where previously the documentation stopped in the 19th century. The present editor, John Simpson, explains that in some cases ‘quotations formerly published in the Dictionary have been silently omitted.’ This could be construed as censorship or ‘deletion’, but plainly it is being done in the interests of balance. No dictionary can be truly ...

After-Time

Christopher Hitchens, 19 October 1995

Palimpsest: A Memoir 
by Gore Vidal.
Deutsch, 432 pp., £17.99, October 1995, 0 233 98891 2
Show More
Show More
... Socialist candidate for the governorship of California, Alice Warfield Mien (mother of Wallis Simpson) and Alice Roosevelt Longworth, grande dame of Washington dynastic bitchery. (She had a motto emblazoned on her sofa-cushion in Georgetown: ‘If you can’t think of anything nice to say about anybody, come and sit by me.’) A clutch of Supreme Court ...

Ethnic Cleansers

Stephen Smith, 8 October 1992

Four Hours in My Lai: A War Crime and its Aftermath 
by Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim.
Viking, 430 pp., £17.99, May 1992, 0 670 83233 2
Show More
Tiger Balm: Travels in Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia 
by Lucretia Stewart.
Chatto, 261 pp., £10.99, June 1992, 0 7011 3892 0
Show More
Show More
... Born too late – and that was the least of it – to be James Fenton, I cannot claim to have spent the fall of Saigon hitchhiking to President Nguyen Van Thieu’s palace aboard a Northern Vietnamese tank. By the time I reached the city, more than a decade after the President’s government was toppled, I was also a little late to experience the thrill that the poet and war correspondent had felt in living through its death throes ...

Best Things

Alan Hollinghurst, 20 August 1981

Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation with John Haffenden 
Faber, 189 pp., £7.50, June 1981, 0 571 11689 2Show More
A Free Translation 
by Craig Raine.
Salamander, 29 pp., £4.50, June 1981, 0 907540 02 3
Show More
A German Requiem 
by James Fenton.
Salamander, 9 pp., £1.50, January 1981, 0 907540 00 7
Show More
Caviare at the Funeral 
by Louis Simpson.
Oxford, 89 pp., £4.50, April 1981, 0 19 211943 5
Show More
Show More
... child who reacts and the self-conscious father who writes poems has never been so clear. It was James Fenton who first defined the ‘Martian School’, and his brother Tom has printed, very beautifully, these Salamander books. But Fenton’s career and preoccupations have been very different from Raine’s, and his poems have tended increasingly to a ...

Educating Georgie

E.S. Turner, 6 December 1984

Matriarch: Queen Mary and the House of Windsor 
by Anne Edwards.
Hodder, 462 pp., £12.95, September 1984, 0 340 24465 8
Show More
Show More
... that identifies Prince Eddy, the Queen’s first fiancé, as Jack the Ripper? Indeed it can. James Pope-Hennessy did not find room to discuss this matter in his 685-page life of Queen Mary published in 1959, possibly because the hue and cry after Prince Eddy had not then gained its full impetus, possibly for other reasons. What can Anne Edwards tell us ...

Light Entertainment

Andrew O’Hagan: Our Paedophile Culture, 8 November 2012

... the strongest emotions. In his book Strange Places, Questionable People, published in 1998, John Simpson, the BBC’s world affairs editor, writes about his early days there. In 1967, he was given the task of preparing the obituary of a famous children’s presenter. He calls him ‘Uncle Dick’. In 1998, and still today, ...

Diary

James Lasdun: Police procedurals, 8 September 2011

... to prove any of this). But they acquitted Casey all the same, and the country now has a new O.J. Simpson: an unassimilable conundrum of legal innocence and universally presumed guilt. All of this was instructive to follow, but it couldn’t help me write sentences with gun-names and criminal actions in them, not without feeling like a fraud. Some kind of ...

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