Search Results

Advanced Search

16 to 30 of 65 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Old Gravy

Mark Ford, 7 September 1995

Robert Graves: Life on the Edge 
by Miranda Seymour.
Doubleday, 524 pp., £20, July 1995, 0 385 40423 9
Show More
Robert Graves and the White Goddess 
by Richard Perceval Graves.
Weidenfeld, 618 pp., £25, July 1995, 0 297 81534 2
Show More
Robert Graves: His Life and Work 
by Martin Seymour-Smith.
Bloomsbury, 600 pp., £25, June 1995, 0 7475 2205 7
Show More
Robert Graves: Collected Writings on Poetry 
edited by Paul O’Prey.
Carcanet, 560 pp., £35, June 1995, 1 85754 172 3
Show More
Robert Graves: The Centenary Selected Poems 
edited by Patrick Quinn.
Carcanet, 160 pp., £15.95, April 1995, 9781857541267
Show More
Show More
... much ambiguity – she wanted to kill him, and not quickly.’ Miranda Seymour (no relation) and Richard Perceval Graves (the poet’s nephew) present Amy Graves in less hysterical terms, but agree that her rigid notions of purity helped inculcate Graves’s sexual difficulties. When on holiday with his family in Brussels in 1912, a young Irish girl staying ...

Friends with Benefits

Tom Stevenson: The Five Eyes, 19 January 2023

The Secret History of the Five Eyes: The Untold Story of the Shadowy International Spy Network, through Its Targets, Traitors and Spies 
by Richard Kerbaj.
John Blake, 416 pp., £25, September 2022, 978 1 78946 503 7
Show More
Sub-Imperial Power: Australia in the International Arena 
by Clinton Fernandes.
Melbourne, 176 pp., £35.95, October 2022, 978 0 522 87926 1
Show More
Show More
... between the US and UK to share codebreaking methods. In his history of the Five Eyes system, Richard Kerbaj goes back to 1938, when an MI5 officer decided to tip off the US embassy in London about a minor German plot to steal secrets from an American colonel in New York. After the culprit was arrested, another MI5 officer, Guy Liddell, travelled to the ...

At the British Library

Peter Campbell: The lie of the land, 20 September 2001

... Library from the Ministry of Defence only in 1995. Even longer under cover was the map on which Richard Oswald, a friend of Benjamin Franklin and secretary to the British delegation which negotiated the Treaty of Paris in 1782, marked in red the proposed frontier between the United States and Canada. It was provided for the private use of his British ...

Dam and Blast

David Lodge, 21 October 1982

... Its effectiveness owes much, no doubt, to R. C. Sherriff’s screenplay, for his classic drama of trench warfare in the First World War, Journey’s End, had much the same strengths and limitations. The feature of The Dam Busters that grates most on the viewer in 1982 is that the hero’s pet dog is called ‘Nigger’ and that the name is adopted as the code ...

No Place for Grumblers

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite: Ready for the Bomb?, 27 July 2023

Attack Warning Red! How Britain Prepared for Nuclear War 
by Julie McDowall.
Bodley Head, 246 pp., £22, April, 978 1 84792 621 0
Show More
Show More
... constructed). An activist for the CND built type 1b – an A-frame made of scaffolding, set over a trench and covered with plywood, polythene, mattresses and earth, with a small pipe for ventilation – and lived in it for two weeks. Unsurprisingly, he was bored and uncomfortable. It was soon damp and mouldy; his skin was ‘wet all the time’; the smell of ...

Verbing a noun

Patrick Parrinder, 17 March 1988

Out of this World 
by Graham Swift.
Viking, 208 pp., £10.95, March 1988, 0 670 82084 9
Show More
Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance 
by Richard Powers.
Weidenfeld, 352 pp., £12.95, March 1988, 0 297 79273 3
Show More
The March Fence 
by Matthew Yorke.
Viking, 233 pp., £10.95, March 1988, 0 670 81848 8
Show More
What is the matter with Mary Jane? 
by Daisy Waugh.
Heinemann, 182 pp., £10.95, February 1988, 0 434 84390 3
Show More
Show More
... he called ‘Man of the 20th Century’. This grandiose scheme provides one of the sources of Richard Powers’s first novel. The title, Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance, refers to a photograph of young men in felt hats and starched collars walking along a country road, which Sander took in May 1914. Graham Swift is another novelist who, like ...

What kind of funny is he?

Rivka Galchen: Under Kafka’s Spell, 4 December 2014

Kafka: The Years of Insight 
by Reiner Stach, translated by Shelley Frisch.
Princeton, 682 pp., £24.95, June 2013, 978 0 691 14751 2
Show More
Kafka: The Decisive Years 
by Reiner Stach, translated by Shelley Frisch.
Princeton, 552 pp., £16.25, June 2013, 978 0 691 14741 3
Show More
Show More
... in and around his life, and I mean it in the tradition of comedies like the final episode of Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder, which, after episode upon episode of darlings and foilings and cross-dressings, ends in 1917 with our not exactly heroes climbing out of their trench and running towards the ...

Answering back

James Campbell, 11 July 1991

The Intended 
by David Dabydeen.
Secker, 246 pp., £13.99, February 1991, 0 436 20007 4
Show More
Cambridge 
by Caryl Phillips.
Bloomsbury, 185 pp., £13.99, March 1991, 0 7475 0886 0
Show More
Lucy 
by Jamaica Kincaid.
Cape, 176 pp., £11.99, April 1991, 0 224 03055 8
Show More
Show More
... then of the poets Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown, and next a line of novelists headed by Richard Wright, began the task of reclamation about two generations earlier than the Caribbean writers who identified – if one can nowadays put it that way – with Europe, specifically England. Their literary industry, centred largely in London, only really ...

Seven Miles per Hour

Robert Macfarlane: The men who invented flight, 5 February 2004

First to Fly: The Unlikely Triumph of Wilbur and Orville Wright 
by James Tobin.
Murray, 431 pp., £9.99, November 2003, 0 7195 5738 0
Show More
The Wright Brothers: The Aviation Pioneers who Changed the World 
by Ian Mackersey.
Little, Brown, 554 pp., £20, October 2003, 0 316 86144 8
Show More
Wings of Madness: Alberto Santos-Dumont and the Invention of Flight 
by Paul Hoffman.
Fourth Estate, 369 pp., £18.99, June 2003, 1 84115 368 0
Show More
Taking Flight: Inventing the Aerial Age from Antiquity to the First World War 
by Richard Hallion.
Oxford, 531 pp., £20, September 2003, 0 19 516035 5
Show More
Show More
... air force: Germany and Russia each had as many as 250 craft. In the autumn of 1914, resting in a trench outside Antwerp, Rupert Brooke jotted down in his notebook that a ‘lovely glittering aeroplane’ had passed overhead. Around the same time, an anonymous French soldier saw an artillery-spotting German Taube puttering past. ‘There is that wretched bird ...

Dancing and Flirting

Mark Ford: Apollinaire, 24 May 2018

Zone: Selected Poems 
by Guillaume Apollinaire, translated by Ron Padgett.
NYRB, 251 pp., £9.99, January 2016, 978 1 59017 924 6
Show More
Selected Poems 
by Guillaume Apollinaire, translated by Martin Sorrell.
Oxford, 281 pp., £9.99, November 2015, 978 0 19 968759 6
Show More
Show More
... Love’ deployed the traditional language of love poetry to communicate the intensity of trench warfare and the bonds of male affection it fostered (‘Red lips are not so red/As the stained stones kissed by the English dead’), Apollinaire seems to be evoking erotic fantasies as a means of escape and survival: his transformation of German artillery ...

Diary

Richard Lloyd Parry: In Pyongyang, 24 January 2019

... wheel, which opened in 1984. In the amusement arcade, girls of university age in high heels and trench coats eyed boys in tight jeans, who were trying a bit too hard. I suspect that this subsection of youth culture has been a feature of the city for a while. But the guides on my previous visits would never have had the confidence to expose a foreign ...

Diary

Paul Laity: Henry Woodd Nevinson, 3 February 2000

... very problematically in love with his best friend’s wife. I knew little about his artist son, Richard – C.R.W. Nevinson – apart from his First World War paintings and prints. They are easy to like: influenced by Cubism but totally comprehensible – a sort of Modernism-lite. I went to the Nevinson retrospective at the Imperial War Museum hoping for ...

Fifty Years On

Richard Wollheim, 23 June 1994

... under orders. My Wehrmacht captors invariably panicked. One evening, just after I had dug my slit trench, word came that a nearby German major would be pleased to give dinner to a British officer in captivity. My host, with one eye, one arm, the Iron Cross with oakleaves, talked in a strained voice of the epic experience of war. Were we British, he wanted to ...

Bull

Bernard Wasserstein, 23 September 1993

Imperial Warrior: The Life and Times of Field-Marshal Viscount Allenby 1861-1936 
by Lawrence James.
Weidenfeld, 279 pp., £20, January 1993, 0 297 81152 5
Show More
Show More
... of fury. On one occasion he was roused to a paroxysm of rage by a corpse that he found in a trench wearing a cap rather than a helmet. It was pointed out to the General that the miscreant was dead; this plea in mitigation was found unacceptable. Suddenly in 1917, Allenby fell foul of Haig after expressing the mildest possible dissent from the strategy ...

Fools

P.N. Furbank, 15 October 1981

Ford Madox Ford: Prose and Politics 
by Robert Green.
Cambridge, 218 pp., £16.50, July 1981, 9780521236102
Show More
Show More
... Tietjens. Christopher Tietjens, as a result of his love for Valentine Wannop and his experience of trench warfare, is prised out of his class prejudices. Such a humanist and sentimental theme would not have been admissible in a ‘French-style’ novel, and we are to see in Ford’s own war experience one of the factors which called forth his new ...

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