Search Results

Advanced Search

1 to 9 of 9 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Doing it with the in-laws

Francis Gooding, 12 September 2024

Forbidden Fruit: An Anthropologist Looks at Incest 
by Maurice Godelier, translated by Nora Scott.
Verso, 100 pp., £9.99, September 2023, 978 1 80429 234 1
Show More
Show More
... Maurice Godelier’​ s Forbidden Fruit is a small book about a big subject. It can afford to be short because, despite all the ink spilled and pencils chewed, what is known about incest and its prohibition can be summarised quite succinctly. The origin of the incest taboo is still a mystery, and though many theories have been proposed, few universal conclusions can safely be drawn; like the appearance of human language, it is a problem that is unlikely to be definitively resolved ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘The Taking of Pelham One Two Three’, 6 August 2009

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three 
directed by Tony Scott.
Show More
Show More
... This is a heist movie, but the caper itself gets a little blurred, because the director, Tony Scott, is not very interested in the planning or execution of crime, only in the psychodrama of criminality, and its counterpointing with the travails of the good man, in this case Denzel Washington, caught up in a large-scale crisis. Around the two personalities ...

Not Enough Delilahs

Andrew O’Hagan: Lillian Ross, 4 July 2019

Picture 
by Lillian Ross.
NYRB, 219 pp., £14.99, June 2019, 978 1 68137 315 7
Show More
Show More
... to the theatre, and had tea first at the Waldorf Astoria, where she spent the whole time berating Nora Ephron. She thought Ephron was slightly worse than Timothy McVeigh. Or was it the Unabomber? Anyhow, all the way to the theatre and all the way through the play: Nora. The night ended with a lecture, with ...

None of it is your material

Madeleine Schwartz: What Zelda Did, 18 April 2019

Save Me the Waltz 
by Zelda Fitzgerald.
Handheld Press, 268 pp., £12.99, January 2019, 978 1 9998280 4 2
Show More
Show More
... Véra Nabokov​ , Nora Joyce, Ann Malamud, Vivien Eliot – the list of literary victim-wives is long, but none commands as much attention as Zelda Fitzgerald. Recent years have treated her husband unkindly, or maybe truthfully, exposing more drinking and more affairs, but decades after Zelda’s death in a North Carolina asylum, her cult is teeming with new acolytes ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: 'Marriage Story', 2 January 2020

... hires a lawyer recommended by her television producer, and everything changes. The lawyer – Nora Fanshaw, brilliantly played by Laura Dern – knows it is her job to orchestrate and make profitable the anger Nicole may not feel, and she is more than equal to any legal opponent who may show up. Charlie hoped to use a New York firm, but has to turn to ...

Satanic School

Rosemary Ashton, 7 May 1987

Forbidden Partners: The Incest Taboo in Modern Culture 
by James Twitchell.
Columbia, 311 pp., £15.60, December 1986, 0 231 06412 8
Show More
Shelley and his Circle 1773-1822: Vols VII and VIII 
edited by Donald Reiman and Doucet Devin Fischer.
Harvard, 1228 pp., £71.95, October 1986, 0 674 80613 1
Show More
Shelley’s Venomed Melody 
by Nora Crook and Derek Guiton.
Cambridge, 273 pp., £25, August 1986, 0 521 32084 4
Show More
The Journals of Mary Shelley 1814-1844 
edited by Paula Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert.
Oxford, 735 pp., £55, March 1987, 0 19 812571 2
Show More
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Selected Letters 
edited by H.J. Jackson.
Oxford, 306 pp., £19.50, April 1987, 0 19 818540 5
Show More
Show More
... body of documentation and research – no longer in a void.’ In Shelley’s Venomed Melody, Nora Crook and Derek Guiton take as their starting-point Thornton Hunt’s comment in an article of 1863 that Shelley probably contracted venereal disease as a young man, and proceed to examine his illnesses and hypochondria in the light of medical thinking at ...

In a Tuft of Thistle

Robert Crawford: Borges is Coming, 16 December 2021

Borges and Me: An Encounter 
by Jay Parini.
Canongate, 299 pp., £14.99, August, 978 1 83885 022 7
Show More
Show More
... libraries, Don Quixote and lost love. Towards the end of ‘The Congress’ a Norwegian called Nora is joined briefly by a man called Glencoe as they sing from the doom-laden ‘Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens’, which begins in ‘Dunferline toun’ – like St Andrews, in Fife – and chronicles the loss of a ship and its crew on the North Sea, while ...

Ink Blots, Pin Holes

Caroline Gonda: ‘Frankenstein’, 28 January 2010

The Original ‘Frankenstein’ 
by Mary Shelley, with Percy Shelley, edited by Charles Robinson.
Bodleian Library, 448 pp., £14.99, October 2009, 978 1 85124 396 9
Show More
Show More
... and additions in a copy of the 1818 first edition which she gave to a Mrs Thomas of Genoa in 1823; Nora Crook’s 1996 edition of Frankenstein includes these changes, as well as those from the editions printed in 1823 and 1831, in her extremely useful appendix on textual variants. She identifies the changes to the two-volume 1823 edition as almost certainly ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2005, 5 January 2006

... from the Home Office. 4 October, L’Espiessac. Staying at the house for a couple of days is Scott Harrison, a young man who once worked as a barman for Lynn W. but is now a photographer, working on a hospital ship which plies up and down the coast of West Africa where it berths at various ports and treats the local population, particularly those ...

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