Search Results

Advanced Search

16 to 24 of 24 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

The Old Devil and his wife

Lorna Sage, 7 October 1993

... This confirmed me as his creature.I knew my name came out of one of the blacked-out books – Lorna from Lorna Doone – and that he’d chosen it. Now he’d given me a special key to his world, it seemed. We were even closer allies afterwards, so that when he took me with him in the rattling Singer to Whitchurch, and ...

My Schooldays

Lorna Sage, 21 October 1993

... These days Hanmer School is tranquil and thriving, just the kind of country school people campaign to keep open because it’s gentler than the bigger urban versions, and the kids get more individual attention. Astonishing, to me, to go back and eavesdrop on these well-behaved children who wear uniforms, talk trustingly with their teachers, and have even produced a booklet which tells me that the school was first built in 1676, and that the Charity Commissioners reported in 1847 that it was damp and dirty, with rotting furniture ...

Grandma at home

Lorna Sage, 4 November 1993

... Hanmer’s pretty mere, the sloping fields that surrounded us, and the hedges overgrown with hawthorn, honeysuckle and dog roses that fringed the lanes, might as well have been a cunning mirage as far as grandma was concerned. They did nothing to alleviate the lousy desert that made up her picture of village life. She lived like a prisoner, an urban refugee self-immured behind the vicarage’s bars and shutters ...

Diary

Victor Sage: On Lorna Sage, 7 June 2001

... When I was fifteen and a half I received a letter from my new friend Lorna Stockton which announced that she was reading T.S. Eliot, ‘in a tree’. I stared at these words in alarm: who was this T.S. Eliot? Trees, for me, were climbing frames full of cunningly shaped, preferably fatal, challenges to ascent and had no relation to books ...

Bewitchment

James Wood, 8 December 1994

Shadow Dance 
by Angela Carter.
Virago, 182 pp., £9.99, September 1994, 1 85381 840 2
Show More
Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter 
edited by Lorna Sage.
Virago, 358 pp., £8.99, September 1994, 1 85381 760 0
Show More
Show More
... New York Review of Books in April 1992, nine weeks after her death, and he is the wicked uncle of Lorna Sage’s collection of critical essays, Flesh and the Mirror. Hermione Lee, in an intelligent and warm-hearted defence of Carter, calls Bayley’s essay ‘a striking exercise in insidious disparagement’; Elaine Jordan, in a less eloquent ...

Diary

Frank Kermode: Being a critic, 27 May 1999

... young men not then long out of the universities, have very properly combined to congratulate the sage or gaffer on his 60th birthday.* Some of them got their first chance in that pub. A few of the celebrants are, or have been, English dons – John Fuller, Simon Gray, Dan Jacobson; but even they arrived by what might be called the bohemian route. There are ...

A Tale of Three Novels

Michael Holroyd: Violet Trefusis, 11 February 2010

... better in one of Vita’s bestselling novels than in Violet’s own fiction, written in what Lorna Sage called her ‘sardonically lightweight, accomplished and comic’ style. In her memoirs, published in 1952, Violet presented Vita as an uncompromisingly English figure: gauche, perpendicular, stolid, unsuitably dressed in her mother’s old ...

A New Kind of Being

Jenny Turner: Angela Carter, 3 November 2016

The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography 
by Edmund Gordon.
Chatto, 544 pp., £25, October 2016, 978 0 7011 8755 2
Show More
Show More
... when Carter was alive and well. One of her ‘most impressive and humorous achievements’, Lorna Sage, her friend and cleverest critic, once wrote, ‘was that she evolved this part to play: How to Be the Woman Writer. Not that she was wearing a mask exactly: it was more a matter of refusing to observe any decorous distinction between art and ...

I don’t even get bananas

Madeleine Schwartz: Christina Stead, 2 November 2017

The Man Who Loved Children 
by Christina Stead.
Apollo, 528 pp., £10, April 2016, 978 1 78497 148 9
Show More
Letty Fox: Her Luck 
by Christina Stead.
Apollo, 592 pp., £14, May 2017, 978 1 78669 139 2
Show More
Show More
... She​ was famous for being neglected,’ Lorna Sage once said of Christina Stead. In 1955, Elizabeth Hardwick, writing in the New Republic, described trying to obtain Stead’s address from her last American publisher. Only a few years before the New Yorker had called her ‘the most extraordinary woman novelist produced by the English-speaking race since Virginia Woolf ...

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