How do you see recent SVN log entries?

Besides what Bert F said, many commands, including log has the -r (or --revision) option. The following are some practical examples using this option to show ranges of revisions:

To list everything in ascending order:

svn log -r 1:HEAD

To list everything in descending order:

svn log -r HEAD:1

To list everything from the thirteenth to the base of the currently checked-out revision in ascending order:

svn log -r 13:BASE

To get everything between the given dates:

svn log -r {2011-02-02}:{2011-02-03}

You can combine all the above expressions with the --limit option, so that can you have a quite granular control over what is printed. For more info about these -r expressions refer to svn help log or the relevant chapter in the book Version Control with Subversion

limit option, e.g.:

svn log --limit 4

svn log -l 4

Only the last 4 entries

Pipe the output through less or other pager:

svn log | less

I like to use -v for verbose mode.
It'll give you the commit id, comments and all affected files.

svn log -v --limit 4

Example of output:

I added some migrations and deleted a test xml file
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r58687 | mr_x | 2012-04-02 15:31:31 +0200 (Mon, 02 Apr 2012) | 1 line Changed
paths: 
A /trunk/java/App/src/database/support    
A /trunk/java/App/src/database/support/MIGRATE    
A /trunk/java/App/src/database/support/MIGRATE/remove_device.sql
D /trunk/java/App/src/code/test.xml