Search Results

Advanced Search

16 to 30 of 208 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Enfield was nothing

P.N. Furbank: Norman Lewis, 18 December 2003

The Tomb in Seville 
by Norman Lewis.
Cape, 150 pp., £14.99, November 2003, 0 224 07120 3
Show More
Show More
... personal adventures and escapes’ – the very things which, for good or evil, Evelyn Waugh and Peter Fleming and Robert Byron, not to mention Redmond O’Hanlon, assume to be the heart of travel writing. This leads us to the reflection that travel writing, or anyway the best sort, only pretends to be informative. The author, out of self-respect, and by ...

Complete with spats

A.N. Wilson, 27 May 1993

Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul 
by Barbara Reynolds.
Hodder, 398 pp., £25, March 1993, 0 340 58151 4
Show More
Show More
... knowledge of, and evident affection for, Sayers’s fiction – the detective stories about Lord Peter Wimsey especially. And now, she comes forward with what will surely rank as the definitive biography of Sayers. It is not a book which contains any surprises for those of us who have read the previous biographies. Indeed, Dr Reynolds gives us rather ...

It’s good to be alive

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Science does ethics, 9 February 2012

Sex, Murder and the Meaning of Life: A Psychologist Investigates How Evolution, Cognition and Complexity Are Revolutionising Our View of Human Nature 
by Douglas Kenrick.
Basic, 238 pp., £18.99, May 2011, 978 0 465 02044 7
Show More
Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values 
by Sam Harris.
Bantam, 291 pp., £20, April 2011, 978 0 593 06486 3
Show More
The Fair Society: The Science of Human Nature and the Pursuit of Social Justice 
by Peter Corning.
Chicago, 237 pp., $27.50, April 2011, 978 0 226 11627 3
Show More
Show More
... propositions – so seriously that he’s worried about the implication for civil liberties. Peter Corning’s argument in The Fair Society is similar to Kenrick’s: the ‘underlying purpose and vocation of human nature’ is ‘at bottom a contingent survival enterprise’. He uses a grab-bag of recent scientific findings – a little evolutionary ...

Concini and the Squirrel

Peter Campbell, 24 May 1990

Innumeracy 
by John Allen Paulos.
135 pp., £12.95, November 1989, 0 670 83008 9
Show More
The Culture of Print 
edited by Roger Chartier.
351 pp., £35, September 1989, 0 7456 0575 3
Show More
Symbols of Ideal Life 
by Maren Stange.
Cambridge, 190 pp., £25, June 1989, 0 521 32441 6
Show More
The Lines of My Hand 
by Robert Frank.
£30, September 1989, 0 436 16256 3
Show More
Show More
... Jacob Riis, who took pictures of New York slums in the last decades of the 19th century; Lewis Hine, who recorded the conditions of workers (most memorably, child workers) in turn-of-the century mills and factories; Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Walker Evans and others who worked for the Farm Security Administration in the Thirties. The documentary ...

At Tate Britain

Peter Campbell: ‘Watercolour’, 3 March 2011

... as the campanile that reaches up into it, and Burne-Jones’s The Merciful Knight. John Frederick Lewis, who spent ten years in Cairo amassing drawings of Oriental life, came home and turned them into images like Hhareem Life, Constantinople, in which the detail is abundant and accurate but the atmosphere suburban English. In the end he gave up ...

Don’t do it!

Wendy Doniger: Dick Francis, 15 October 1998

Field of 13 
by Dick Francis.
Joseph, 273 pp., £16.99, September 1998, 0 7181 4351 5
Show More
Show More
... personality of the hero in the manner of other series of mystery novels – Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey, Miss Marple, Travis McGee et al. The Francis pattern is more like an obsession: the hero suffers great physical pain and humiliation at the hands of a villain who is often so well liked, powerful and respected that no one but the hero can believe in ...

Roman Wall Blues

Peter Parsons, 17 May 1984

Vindolanda: The Latin Writing-Tablets 
by A.K. Bowman and J.D. Thomas.
Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 157 pp., £16.50, November 1983, 0 907764 02 9
Show More
The Christians as the Romans saw them 
by Robert Wilken.
Yale, 214 pp., £12.95, February 1983, 0 300 03066 5
Show More
The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul 
by Wayne Meeks.
Yale, 299 pp., £15, June 1983, 0 300 02876 8
Show More
Life in Egypt under Roman Rule 
by Naphtali Lewis.
Oxford, 239 pp., £15, August 1983, 0 19 814848 8
Show More
Show More
... of the first Christian century. At the time it would not have been so clear. Paul quarrelled with Peter and Barnabas, and set up on his own. He and his staff founded and guided, by letter and visit, Christian groups in a dozen cities of Asia Minor and Greece. Jesus had asked his followers to give up home, family, worldly goods: Paul had to temper this message ...

Dark Knight

Tom Shippey, 24 February 1994

The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory 
by P.J.C. Field.
Boydell and Brewer, 218 pp., £29.50, September 1993, 0 85991 385 6
Show More
Show More
... Darthur itself, Caxton’s ‘noble and joyous hystorye’, and its presumptive author, in C.S. Lewis’s phrase, ‘little better than a criminal’. Actually, Lewis much understated the case. If one goes by the records, slowly unearthed in the Twenties and Thirties by Edward Cobb, Edward Hicks and A.C. Baugh, the Malory ...

At Dulwich Picture Gallery

Peter Campbell: David Wilkie, 31 October 2002

... studies in Rembrandt-like shorthand and even Oriental studies which probably owe something to J.F. Lewis (Wilkie met him on his travels). How far this elusive personality had to do with being Scottish is a matter for debate. His genre paintings, after he came to London, are not strongly Scottish in their detail (as a Lowlander he was unhappy that the kilt and ...
Ngaio Marsh: A Life 
by Margaret Lewis.
Chatto, 276 pp., £18, April 1991, 0 7011 3389 9
Show More
Show More
... Ngaio Marsh reigns supreme for excellence of style and characterisation,’ writes Margaret Lewis in her introduction. The proposition could be contested; it could be maintained that Christie is more ingenious, Allingham more lively and Sayers has more intellectual weight. But Margaret Lewis’s problem as a ...

At the British Museum

Peter Campbell: American Prints, 8 May 2008

... the pressure-dependent thicks and thins of a pen-drawn line. Drypoints of night scenes by Martin Lewis exploit the uniquely dense blacks that etching can achieve. (In a number of them a dark ground was produced by first running the plate through the press with a sheet of sandpaper.) These are striking, if conventional, images that stand in a line you can ...

Just William

Doris Grumbach, 25 June 1987

Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice 
by Sharon O’Brien.
Oxford, 544 pp., £22.50, March 1987, 0 19 504132 1
Show More
Show More
... subject of increasing critical interest. In her lifetime she was praised by H.L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Louise Bogan, but Edmund Wilson said that One of Ours,* her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, was a complete failure and that My Antonia ended on the level of a Ladies Home Journal serial. Lionel Trilling called The Professor’s House ‘lame’ and Ernest ...

Six hands at an open door

David Trotter, 21 March 1991

Intertextual Dynamics within the Literary Group: Joyce, Lewis, Pound and Eliot 
by Dennis Brown.
Macmillan, 230 pp., £35, November 1990, 9780333516461
Show More
An Immodest Violet: The Life of Violet Hunt 
by Joan Hardwick.
Deutsch, 205 pp., £14.99, November 1990, 0 233 98639 1
Show More
Show More
... contribution is ‘to argue for the stylistic influence of the early Vorticist prose of Wyndham Lewis on key texts of Joyce, Pound and Eliot and to reaffirm Lewis’s important role within the Modernist venture’. However, his study of these texts has led him to the ‘distinctly unconventional hypothesis’ that they ...

The Enemy

Marian FitzGerald: The Great Prison Disaster, 18 December 2003

Prisongate: The Shocking State of Britain’s Prisons and the Need for Visionary Change 
by David Ramsbotham.
Free Press, 267 pp., £20, October 2003, 0 7432 3884 2
Show More
Show More
... In 1995 Michael Howard, the Tory Home Secretary, dismissed Derek Lewis from his post as Director General of the Prison Service and appointed David Ramsbotham Chief Inspector of Prisons. Lewis then wrote a book about his experience – Hidden Agendas: Politics, Law and Disorder (1997) – which reflects very badly on Howard ...

Dwarf-Basher

Michael Dobson, 8 June 1995

Edmond Malone, Shakespearean Scholar: A Literary Biography 
by Peter Martin.
Cambridge, 298 pp., £40, April 1995, 0 521 46030 1
Show More
Show More
... whose glinting eyes, in Reynolds’s 1778 portrait, stare fixedly past us from the dust-jacket of Peter Martin’s biography. Indeed the book’s steady prose, for all its professions of admiration, does little to suggest that Martin (the first writer to undertake a life of Malone since 1860) has managed to muster much of the personal empathy and enthusiasm ...

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