Poet Squab

Claude Rawson, 3 March 1988

John Dryden and His World 
by James Anderson Winn..
Yale, 651 pp., £19.95, November 1987, 0 300 02994 2
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John Dryden 
edited by Keith Walker.
Oxford, 967 pp., £22.50, January 1987, 0 19 254192 7
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... There is an anonymous portrait of Dryden, ‘dated 1657 but probably 1662’, which shows a full-fed figure with plump alert eyes, comfortable and predatory. He seems poised between repletion and dyspepsia, like a bewigged Nigel Lawson, arrested for all time at the moment of incipient eructation. James Winn says: ‘His short, squat figure later led his enemies to call him “Poet Squab”, and the plump birdlike face in this picture justifies the nickname ...

Elegant Extracts

Leah Price: Anthologies, 3 February 2000

The Oxford Book of English Verse 
edited by Christopher Ricks.
Oxford, 690 pp., £25, October 1999, 0 19 214182 1
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The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume One 
edited by M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt.
Norton, 2974 pp., £22.50, December 1999, 0 393 97487 1
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The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume Two 
edited by M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt.
Norton, 2963 pp., £22.50, February 2000, 9780393974911
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The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Volume One 
edited by David Damrosch.
Longman, 2963 pp., $53, July 1999, 0 321 01173 2
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The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Volume Two 
edited by David Damrosch.
Longman, 2982 pp., $53, July 1999, 0 321 01174 0
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Night & Horses & The Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature 
edited by Robert Irwin.
Allen Lane, 480 pp., £25, September 1999, 0 7139 9153 4
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News that Stays News: The 20th Century in Poems 
edited by Simon Rae.
Faber, 189 pp., £9.99, October 1999, 0 571 20060 5
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Time’s Tidings: Greeting the 21st Century 
by Carol Ann Duffy.
Anvil, 157 pp., £7.95, November 1999, 0 85646 313 2
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Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the 20th Century in Poetry 
edited by Peter Forbes.
Penguin, 640 pp., £12.99, February 1999, 9780140588996
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... press, a miscellany of writings from Bloomsbury, a quirky Condition of England chapter in which anonymous ballads jostle blue books, and a pyrotechnic conclusion on the politics of language. The Longman is a polemical anthology. At the point when many feminist critics were either turning away from anthologies to photocopies and electronic databases, or else ...

Carry on writing

Stephen Bann, 15 March 1984

The Two of Us 
by John Braine.
Methuen, 183 pp., £7.95, March 1984, 0 413 51280 0
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An Open Prison 
by J.I.M. Stewart.
Gollancz, 192 pp., £7.95, February 1984, 0 575 03380 0
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Havannah 
by Hugh Thomas.
Hamish Hamilton, 263 pp., £9.95, February 1984, 0 241 11175 7
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Sunrising 
by David Cook.
Secker, 248 pp., £8.50, February 1984, 0 436 10674 4
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Memoirs of an Anti-Semite 
by Gregor von Rezzori, translated by Joachim Neugroschel.
Picador, 282 pp., £7.95, January 1984, 0 330 28325 1
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It’s me, Eddie 
by Edward Limonov, translated by S.L. Campbell.
Picador, 264 pp., £7.95, March 1984, 0 330 28329 4
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The Anatomy Lesson 
by Philip Roth.
Cape, 291 pp., £8.95, February 1984, 0 224 02960 6
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... over from his previous situation a habit of systematic defiance, he exhibits himself to the anonymous inhabitants of the Great City: I’m not inhibited. I am often to be found bareassed in my shallow little room, my member pale against the background of the rest of my body, and I do not give a damn whether they see me or don’t, the ...

Photo-Finish

John Hedley Brooke, 23 May 1985

Just Before the Origin: Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory of Evolution 
by John Langdon Brooks.
Columbia, 284 pp., $39, January 1984, 0 231 05676 1
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China and Charles Darwin 
by James Reeve Pusey.
Harvard, 544 pp., £21.25, February 1984, 0 674 11735 2
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... that each remembered Malthus at a critical moment, and that evolution (to judge from the anonymous Vestiges, 1844) was patently in the air. Whether one embraces the inductivist models, or the stronger programmes in the sociology of knowledge, the conclusion might be much the same: simultaneous discovery eliminates the scientific genius. That would be ...

Undesirable

Tom Paulin, 9 May 1996

T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form 
by Anthony Julius.
Cambridge, 308 pp., £30, September 1995, 0 521 47063 3
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... Eliot and Prejudice, it has ‘the stamp of his approval and the stamp of his tone’. Calling the anonymous notice ‘shameful’, Ricks expresses the hope that ‘such cruelly self-righteous impercipience’ was later recognised by Eliot to be among ‘the things ill done and done to others’ harm which once he took for exercise of virtue’. Like Ricks, I ...

Here come the judges

Conor Gearty: The constitution, 4 June 1998

This Time: Our Constitutional Revolution 
by Anthony Barnett.
Vintage, 371 pp., £6.99, December 1997, 0 09 926858 2
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The Voice of the People: A Constitution for Tomorrow 
by Robert Alexander.
Weidenfeld, 214 pp., £17.99, September 1997, 0 297 84109 2
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The Making and Remaking of the British Constitution 
by Lord Nolan and Stephen Sedley.
Blackstone, 142 pp., £19.95, November 1997, 1 85431 704 0
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... quavers go and what crotchets sound like. The change had been made in the name of the People by anonymous tribunes so certain of their rectitude that to consult the congregation, much less let it decide, would have been tautological. After a few years of disgrace following the collapse of various ‘People’s Republics’, the ‘People’ are back with a ...

Elsinore’s Star Bullshitter

Michael Dobson, 13 September 2018

Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness 
by Rhodri Lewis.
Princeton, 365 pp., £30, November 2017, 978 0 691 16684 1
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... quarto text that lies behind the oldest surviving translated version of any Shakespeare play, the anonymous Der Bestrafte Brudermord (eventually published in 1781 from a now lost manuscript of 1710, though it probably dates from nearly a century earlier). Back home, it was one of the Shakespeare plays that remained in the King’s Men’s active repertory ...

Paper or Plastic?

John Sutherland: Richard Powers, 10 August 2000

Gain 
by Richard Powers.
Heinemann, 355 pp., £15.99, March 2000, 0 434 00862 1
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... National Book Awards or (in the academic community, at least) the Oscars. Decisions are made by an anonymous jury of 13 (the supernumerary is mysterious) whose deliberations are shrouded in conspiratorial secrecy. Behind the hooded 13 are a few hundred equally anonymous ‘nominators’ – genius’s snitches. You cannot ...

What’s left of Henrietta Lacks?

Anne Enright: HeLa, 13 April 2000

... picture of a ‘cultured rat bone marrow cell’, magnified 19,500 times. According to the anonymous author, the HeLa line was begun when cells were taken from the cervix of a 31-year-old Baltimore woman, for tests. The woman died of cancer eight months later but in the meantime some of the cells found their way to the lab of John and Margaret Gey of ...

A Touchy Lot

Lynn Hunt: Libelling for a Living, 11 March 2010

The Devil in the Holy Water, or, The Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon 
by Robert Darnton.
Pennsylvania, 534 pp., £23, December 2009, 978 0 8122 4183 9
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Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution: The Culture of Calumny and the Problem of Free Speech 
by Charles Walton.
Oxford, 348 pp., £32.50, February 2009, 978 0 19 536775 1
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... or from the intended targets of blackmail. One of Jacquet’s Parisian enterprises was a 60-page anonymous denunciation of prominent figures supposedly involved in schemes to make money from gambling and prostitution in the capital. The names of high police and government officials appeared in italics in the text with detailed accounts of how they had raked ...

Full of Glory

John Mullan: The Inklings, 19 November 2015

The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings 
by Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski.
Farrar, Straus, 644 pp., £11.20, June 2015, 978 0 374 15409 7
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... published novel called The Hobbit appeared in the Times Literary Supplement. The Hobbit was, the anonymous reviewer said, ‘a children’s book only in the sense that the first of many readings can be undertaken in the nursery’. It was to be compared to Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories, as belonging to ‘a very small class of books which have nothing in ...

Silks and Bright Scarlet

Christopher Kelly: Wealth and the Romans, 3 December 2015

Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD 
by Peter Brown.
Princeton, 759 pp., £16.95, March 2014, 978 0 691 16177 8
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The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity 
by Peter Brown.
Harvard, 262 pp., £18.95, April 2015, 978 0 674 96758 8
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... in Paulinus’ project at Nola a rather too comfortable strain of ‘designer poverty’. The anonymous social commentator who sometime between 408 and 414 wrote a radical pamphlet entitled On Riches doubted that the wealthy could ever find salvation, no matter how charitably they deployed their resources. At its root, all wealth was the result of ...

At the Video Store

Daniel Soar: Saramago, 2 December 2004

The Double 
by José Saramago, translated by Margaret Jull Costa.
Harvill, 292 pp., £15.99, August 2004, 1 84343 099 1
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... it seems. The traditional detective wears a false beard in order to avoid being recognised, to be anonymous. Until he decides to give it up – for whatever reason, with whatever motive and intent – Tertuliano Máximo Afonso has been wearing his false beard, as is traditional, to aid his clandestine activities. He lurks outside António Claro’s apartment ...

Diary

Alexander Briant: Oil Industry Corruption, 19 January 2017

... in a variety of ways. There is a phone number they can call anonymously (and it is truly anonymous), and there are email addresses to which they can report their concerns. Employees who would otherwise be too scared to come forward record genuine complaints in this way; others, perhaps engaged in personal vendettas, make slanderous claims about ...

Weimarama

Richard J. Evans, 8 November 1990

Male Fantasies Vol. I: Women, Floods, Bodies, History 
by Klaus Theweleit, translated by Chris Turner, Erica Carter and Stephen Conway.
Polity, 517 pp., £35, May 1987, 0 7456 0382 3
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Male Fantasies Vol. II: Male Bodies: Psychoanalysing the White Terror 
by Klaus Theweleit, translated by Chris Turner, Erica Carter and Stephen Conway.
Polity, 507 pp., £35, September 1989, 0 7456 0556 7
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... contrast which his authors draw between their conventional, bourgeois wives, asexual, pure, anonymous, ‘white’, and the raging, shrieking, demonic, castrating ‘red’ whores whom they see on the side of their opponents, seems to Theweleit but a colourful exaggeration of the paler dichotomies common in the conventional perceptions of women by men ...