One Foot out of the Grave

Adewale Maja-Pearce: Kagame after Karegeya, 1 July 2021

Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad 
by Michela Wrong.
Fourth Estate, 512 pp., £20, April, 978 0 00 823887 2
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... the Rwandan economy has been growing at a rate of 7 per cent a year, but according to an anonymous statistician in the Review of African Political Economy only South Sudan has experienced ‘a faster increase in poverty’. Two-thirds of the population now lives below the poverty line, an increase of 15 per cent in a decade.Wrong’s book is a record ...

Wordsworth and the Well-Hidden Corpse

Marilyn Butler, 6 August 1992

The Lyrical Ballads: Longman Annotated Texts 
edited by Michael Mason.
Longman, 419 pp., £29.99, April 1992, 0 582 03302 0
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Strange Power of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge and Literary Possession 
by Susan Eilenberg.
Oxford, 278 pp., £30, May 1992, 0 19 506856 4
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The Politics of Nature: Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries 
by Nicholas Roe.
Macmillan, 186 pp., £35, April 1992, 0 333 52314 8
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... significance sticking to the year. Mason points out that the original version of 1798, which was anonymous, caught on less well than the second (1800), twice as long, and firmly attributed to Wordsworth alone. The two authors worked on four editions, appearing over seven years, further proof that there was no ‘historical moment but a sequence of ...

What sort of traitors?

Neal Ascherson, 7 February 1980

The Climate of Treason 
by Andrew Boyle.
Hutchinson, 504 pp., £8.95, November 1980, 9780091393403
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... George Carey-Foster, Sir Frederick Warner, agents and diplomats on the security side, and a large anonymous group of Intelligence men from both branches of the service, retired and active. The reason can be guessed at. Boyle’s American breakthrough depended upon the Freedom of Information Act, which brought him baskets of US Intelligence material on matters ...

Conspiratorial Hapsburger

Michael Hofmann, 5 March 1987

Hotel Savoy 
by Joseph Roth, translated by John Hoare.
Chatto, 183 pp., £9.95, November 1986, 0 7011 2879 8
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... Dan, Andreas Pum, Benjamin Lenz, Franz Tunda. They are largely undifferentiated, undescribed, anonymous, like markers. Where they are is the front line, each of them the flag in his own personal campaign; one can understand why Roth wrote a novel about Napoleon (Die Hundert Tage). They are capable, attractive, viable men, but somehow disabled or ...

Petty Grotesques

Mark Ford: Whitman, 17 March 2011

Democratic Vistas 
by Walt Whitman, edited by Ed Folsom.
Iowa, 143 pp., $24.95, April 2010, 978 1 58729 870 7
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... with which his own productions were received, even those most lavishly praised in numerous ‘anonymous’ reviews, which were all of course penned by Whitman himself. Nevertheless, his belief in America’s overriding need for a new kind of poetry in order to fulfil the promises inherent in democracy never wavered, and it burns brightly, at times indeed ...

Diary

Anne Enright: Lessons from Angela Carter, 17 February 2011

... in one text and the transformations and solutions in the other. Pornography and fairytale are both anonymous forms, and it is tempting to confuse the anonymous with the natural or archetypal. The Sadeian Woman, a book about pornography, was not popular with feminists (and no one else would want to read it). The Bloody ...

Whose Property?

Paul Taylor: Big Medical Data, 8 February 2018

... million in 2005. In April 2011, IMS Health – which now claims to have more than 500 million anonymous patient data records – went to the Supreme Court to challenge the bans, and won. Justice Anthony Kennedy argued that ‘speech in aid of pharmaceutical marketing … is a form of expression protected by the Free Speech Clause of the First ...

Dadada

Vadim Nikitin: Chasing the Cybercriminals, 21 November 2024

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age in Five Extraordinary Hacks 
by Scott J. Shapiro.
Penguin, 420 pp., £10.99, May 2024, 978 0 14 199384 3
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... tried to establish Qilin’s identity and motivations. ‘Our attacks are not accidental,’ an anonymous representative from Qilin told the Register. ‘We choose only those companies whose management is directly or indirectly affiliated with the political elites of a particular country. The politicians of these countries do not keep their word, they ...
The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes: Vols I-II 
edited by Thomas Hobbes and Noel Malcolm.
Oxford, 592 pp., £60, September 1994, 0 19 824065 1
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... extraordinary familiarity with Hobbes’s handwriting and that of his friends and associates. The anonymous collector who owns ‘Considerations touching the facility or difficulty of the motions of a horse’, a work always previously attributed to Hobbes, will be dismayed to find it re-attributed to one of his closest friends, Robert Payne. Another ...

All Together Now

Richard Jenkyns, 11 December 1997

Abide with Me: The World of Victorian Hymns 
by Ian Bradley.
SCM, 299 pp., £30, June 1997, 9780334026921
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The English Hymn: A Critical and Historical Study 
by J.R. Watson.
Oxford, 552 pp., £65, July 1997, 0 19 826762 2
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... best known of all. The most famous American poem of the Victorian age is ‘Away in a manger’ (anonymous), with ‘O little town of Bethlehem’ (Phillips Brooks) and ‘Dear Lord and Father of mankind’ (John Greenleaf Whittier) as runners-up. Among the works of the canonical English poets, the lines known to most people are probably those beginning ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘An Autumn Afternoon’, 22 May 2014

An Autumn Afternoon 
directed by Yasujirō Ozu.
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... What does​ a wedding look like in an Ozu film? Two large hired cars outside an anonymous block of flats. Inside the building, father and elder brother in sleek Western morning suits, younger brother in smart but more casual clothes. Sister-in-law very tidy in black traditional Japanese dress. Bride cloaked in a mountainous confection of pink and white silk, topped by a hat that looks like a small but heavy monument ...

Short Cuts

Daniel Soar: Julian Assange, 18 February 2016

... kept secret, WikiLeaks was a faceless organisation, staffed – we could assume – by an army of anonymous volunteers. Gradually, of course, it came to be represented by a single face: the striking, ghostly one of Julian Assange. It wasn’t Assange’s fault that – in 2010, not long after he released the video he called Collateral Murder, showing US ...

At the Towner Gallery

Brian Dillon: Carey Young, Palais de Justice, 4 April 2019

... to Young or her deliberate editing out of their faces. The young advocates are reduced to anonymous details: an ear, the nape of a neck, hair that rhymes with the tight pleats and loose folds of their robes. In these shots, Young’s long lens produces a tiny depth of field, sharply isolating aspects of person and dress from the blurred suggestion of ...

At Pallant House

Rosemary Hill: Victor Pasmore, 20 April 2017

... of purely abstract form through which to walk, in which to linger and on which to play, a free and anonymous monument which, because of its independence, can lift the activity and psychology of an urban housing community on to a universal plane’. It was both a Modernist statement and a reinvention of a popular 18th-century landscape feature, the Palladian ...

Young Marvin

Frank Kermode, 24 January 1991

A Tenured Professor 
by John Kenneth Galbraith.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 197 pp., £12.95, November 1990, 1 85619 018 8
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Shade those laurels 
by Cyril Connolly and Peter Levi.
Bellew, 174 pp., £12.95, October 1990, 0 947792 37 6
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... that assumption, he reflects that when a lot of people lose a lot of money, there must be others, anonymous, who simultaneously make a lot of money. The irrational euphoria prompting individuals and corporations to such absurd behaviour should be measurable, so Marvin sits down at his computer and builds a model which can predict the point at which the ...