Alphabetophile

Michael Hofmann: Eley Williams, 7 September 2017

Attrib. and Other Stories 
by Eley Williams.
Influx, 169 pp., £9.99, March 2017, 978 1 910312 16 2
Show More
Frit 
by Eley Williams.
Sad, 35 pp., £6, April 2017
Show More
Show More
... are left behind try to think of what might have been a good parting shot, or to find a suitably anonymous bin to chuck the departed’s silk pyjamas into. They are staring into the three holes of the telephone from which they have just received their marching orders, or trying to muster a kiss in a public museum in front of a ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: Agnès Varda, 1 August 2019

... stone walls, an empty château, a shabby graveyard. The people who inhabit these scenes are not anonymous but they seem accidental. ‘I think of tiny figures in old landscape paintings,’ Varda said. And yet we learn more about them – the Moroccan and Tunisian farmworkers, the tramps, the goat-breeding dropouts, the tree-saving professor, the rich old ...

In the Line of Fire

George O’Brien: The Sniper, 28 November 2002

... violating neutral space: bloodying the parking lot, the filling station, the school forecourt. Anonymous though these places are, they’re vital to our going about our business. They’re ours. Everybody’s. They’re what make suburbs possible. The shots weren’t coming from the inner city, but they drowned out the ones constantly being fired there ...

At the Louisiana

Michael Hofmann: On Chaïm Soutine, 24 October 2024

... Babel-like views of Céret and Cagnes, feral trees and spectral dwellings, portraits of anonymous locals, a weird series of chefs and bakers and hotel pages and choristers – a pretext, it has been said, for making paintings that were white with absences, or red with exceptions.Everything from his hand is striking, but especially his ever-raw ...

At the National Gallery

John-Paul Stonard: View from a Prison Window, 6 November 2025

... by the 17th-century Dutch painter Floris van Dijck, and the spectacularly eccentric (and currently anonymous) 16th-century Virgin and Child with Saints Louis and Margaret, with its grotesque dragon at the bottom of the frame. A View of the Sky from a Prison Window, both in its modest dimensions – no larger than a sheet of A4 paper – and plain subject ...

Dark Markets

Donald MacKenzie, 4 June 2015

... among institutional investors. Users of the service, called the Crossing Network, could submit anonymous bids to buy or offers to sell shares after the NYSE and other public trading venues had closed. The user simply entered the number of shares he or she wished to buy or sell; the price of the shares was always that day’s price at the end of public ...

At the National Gallery

Peter Campbell: Fakes, 22 July 2010

... powerful Rembrandt-like qualities and find touches and ways of working that might identify the anonymous worker who made ...

At the Wellcome

Will Self: Bedlam, The Asylum and Beyond, 17 November 2016

... synonymous with mental illness itself; one thinks of Tom o’Bedlam, who urges his listeners in an anonymous 18th-century ballad: ‘Come dame or maid, be not afraid/Poor Tom will injure nothing.’ Matthews, as well as working on the air loom, made beautiful plans for a new Bedlam, since by the early 1800s the baroque palace of an asylum, designed by Robert ...

In the Library

Inigo Thomas, 25 April 2013

... how much more multi can tasking get? Then there’s a phenomenon called ‘noting’, a form of anonymous flirting in the more popular reading rooms, Humanities I and II, or Hum One and Hum Two, as they’re called. You’re seen, then there’s a note on your desk, you have no idea who did the noting. Nor do the guards at each reading-room entrance who ...

Short Cuts

Christian Lorentzen: Fact-checking, 5 April 2012

... cheerful scapegoat, keeping roguish writers in line and protecting editors from vigilante readers, anonymous and grateful for a week full of happy moments of correcting misspelled place names. Luce’s rival at the New Yorker, Harold Ross, set up his own department in 1927. He made a habit of mocking other magazines’ errors and couldn’t leave himself open ...

Reading the Signs

Peter Campbell: London Lettering, 12 December 2002

... between solid structures and scene-painting. The city has become a print-substrate, an almost anonymous structure which you read by way of notices, badges, signs, logos and banners. The battle between one message and another has escalated. There is a descending order of seriousness from the permanent to the ephemeral, and an order of conspicuousness ...

Diary

Francis Wyndham: At the Theatre, 10 November 1988

... the audience is directly addressed from the stage, this audience is conceived as a composite, anonymous creature – and when actors, visited later in their dressing-rooms, politely say, ‘You were a wonderful audience,’ it isn’t the individual spectator who is being praised. By convention, each member of an audience is assumed to be either invisible ...

In Lille

Peter Campbell: Rubens, 1 April 2004

... the women. Rembrandt shows a crowd – the individuals we can name are hardly more prominent than anonymous bystanders. Of the three, Rubens seems least sincere, the most theatrical in the sense that what he is offering could be a tableau set up with models. When you look at the way he put his paintings together you begin to understand why his statement might ...

At Somerset House

Peter Campbell: Zaha Hadid, 16 December 2004

... and digital animations of built and unbuilt work. The paintings are highly finished, with a neat, anonymous surface. In texture and size they look, at first glance, like very close-grained, asymmetric versions of one of Bridget Riley’s prismatically divided, coloured abstracts. But these images do not read as flat surfaces; they are accounts of a ...

Diary

Clancy Martin: My Life as a Drunk, 9 July 2009

... 1950s for treating seizure disorders and similar conditions. After failing with rehab, Alcoholics Anonymous, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and all other conventional treatments for alcoholism, finding himself at what AA calls ‘rock bottom’ feeling he had nothing left to lose, Ameisen began doing research on addiction online, and stumbled on baclofen. He ...