Pseuds’ Skyscraper

Mark Lilla, 5 June 1997

The Ethical Function of Architecture 
by Karsten Harries.
MIT, 414 pp., £29.95, January 1997, 0 262 08252 7
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... training today and so few have the opportunity to build anything more significant than an anonymous office block or house, whose form will be determined almost entirely by the technological constraints of mass-produced materials and conveniences (elevator, climate control), and by the political constraints of planning and safety codes. The turn to ...

Fenmen

Ronald Hutton, 5 August 1982

Fenland Riots and the English Revolution 
by Keith Lindley.
Heinemann, 259 pp., £16.50, March 1982, 0 435 32535 3
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Commonwealth to Protectorate 
by Austin Woolrych.
Oxford, 433 pp., £22.50, March 1982, 0 19 822659 4
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... Austin Woolrych’s book concerns a world of high politics where the provinces exist only as an anonymous public opinion and impinge only in the form of infrequent petitions. It is a narrative of the year 1653, which witnessed within eight months the expulsion of the Rump Parliament, the convention and collapse of Barebone’s Parliament and the institution ...

A Sense of England

Graham Bradshaw, 17 February 1983

Collected Stories 
by V.S. Pritchett.
Chatto, 520 pp., £12.50, June 1982, 0 7011 3904 8
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... set off by the incongruous saloon setting and the contrasting character of an irritably attentive, anonymous narrator. ‘Citizen’ is narrated by a shrewd, very vigorous and intelligent father who can never quite grasp the paralysing effect his strength has on his artistic daughter. In ‘Many are disappointed’ what might have been a merely pathetic sketch ...

Taking pictures

Peter Campbell, 3 July 1980

In Radin’s Studio 
by Albert Elsen.
Phaidon, 192 pp., £10.95, May 1980, 9780714819761
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Henri Cartier-Bresson: Photographer 
Thames and Hudson, 155 pp., £25, April 1980, 0 500 54062 4Show More
Isle of Man: A Book about the Manx 
by Christopher Killip.
Arts Council of Great Britain, 69 pp., £9.95, March 1980, 0 7287 0187 1
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... pointing towards the crowd. Because his pictures work in abstract terms, they do not seem to turn anonymous strangers into symbols of peasant virtue, mother love, the pity of war, and so on; the public faces in his pictures are similarly freed from the need to be icons of greatness. In all his best pictures there is a sense of discovery. But the significance ...

Brought to book

Gordon Williams, 7 May 1981

Ronnie Biggs: His Own Story 
by Michael Joseph.
Sphere, 238 pp., £7.95, March 1981, 9780718119720
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A Sense of Freedom 
by Jimmy Boyle.
Pan, 264 pp., £1.25, September 1977, 0 330 25303 4
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... of his book are, he has undoubtedly changed a great deal, and common humanity makes us wish him an anonymous future far from his fans in the media. Biggs, one feels confident, will land on his toes no matter what dumb moves his brain conjures up (interesting to imagine him and Boyle sharing a cell, the one raging to kill, the other a bit fed up). What can we ...

Angela Carter on the latest thing

Angela Carter, 5 December 1985

Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity 
by Elizabeth Wilson.
Virago, 272 pp., £11.95, November 1985, 0 86068 552 7
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... the characteristic city of the 20th century – created new classes of people, strangers living in anonymous propinquity, for whom appearances, trusting appearances, not going by appearances and keeping up appearances, were of immense importance. These cities of strangers developed a whole culture based upon looking and innovation and consumption, the culture ...

Scenes from British Life

Hugh Barnes, 6 February 1986

Stroke Counterstroke 
by William Camp.
Joseph, 190 pp., £9.95, January 1986, 0 7181 2669 6
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Redhill Rococo 
by Shena Mackay.
Heinemann, 171 pp., £9.95, February 1986, 0 434 44046 9
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Striker 
by Michael Irwin.
Deutsch, 231 pp., £8.95, September 1985, 0 233 97792 9
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... Although he ascribes no date to events in the novel, the Preservatives are in opposition. The anonymous government party, albeit in a lapsed state, still proclaims itself the champion of organised labour. BHM, a minor nationalised company, has been faring badly. The workers are threatening to strike. Meanwhile the Prime Minister, a detached but avuncular ...

Daddy’s Girl

Anita Brookner, 22 December 1983

Fathers: Reflections by Daughters 
edited by Ursula Owen.
Virago, 224 pp., £5.50, November 1983, 9780860683940
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... of characters in history, allowing them a proper dignity, yet ensuring that they remain physically anonymous. Angela Carter comes nearest of all to easy affection and one accepts her independent and eccentric father, to whom she refers as ‘the old man’, as recognisable, possibly because she has written about him so well before or possibly because he might ...

Cornelius Gallus lives

Peter Parsons, 7 February 1980

... in 1590: but they turned out to be his own. Caspar von Barth in 1607 attributed to Gallus the anonymous poem ‘Ciris’, and so have others since: but no one ever believes it for long. The moderns have generally been more subtle in the quest for Gallus. The Roman literary world was as small as Bloomsbury; Gallus must have had great influence in it; if ...

Dead Eyes and Blank Faces

John Henderson: Expression under Nero, 2 April 1998

Dissidence and Literature under Nero: The Price of Rhetoricisation 
by Vasily Rudich.
Routledge, 408 pp., £50, March 1997, 0 415 09501 8
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... victory over Pompey’s Republic on the basis of the ancient Life? (We are told by Lucan’s anonymous biographer that ‘he turned against Nero for walking out on a recital to attend the senate; in a public loo, he farted thunderously and declaimed a half-line penned by the Emperor; he lampooned Him and those close to the throne, and finally came out as ...

Like Fabergé Eggs

Serafina Cuomo: The Antikythera Mechanism, 26 April 2018

A Portable Cosmos: Revealing the Antikythera Mechanism, Scientific Wonder of the Ancient World 
by Alexander Jones.
Oxford, 288 pp., £22.99, March 2017, 978 0 19 973934 9
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... it? Highly unlikely. Were any of their theories incorporated into it? Maybe. The book posits an anonymous designer, whose astronomical competence was good, but not extraordinary. Citing a previous study, Jones characterises the skills required to craft it – those pin-and-slot couplings, and 188 teeth cut more or less equally into a tiny disc – as ...

Ruling the Roast

David A. Bell: A Nation of Beefeaters, 25 September 2003

Beef and Liberty: Roast Beef, John Bull and the English Nation 
by Ben Rogers.
Chatto, 207 pp., £17.99, April 2003, 9780701169800
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... an angry hoof. In Rogers’s account, the suicidally brave bulldogs recall the qualities an anonymous wit once ascribed to the English soldier: ‘he has a courage matched only by his stupidity.’ Significantly, while the figure of John Bull himself possessed many admirable traits, intelligence was conspicuously not among them. Indeed, in the hands of ...

A Bowl of Wheetos

Eleanor Birne: Julie Myerson’s hauntings, 20 July 2006

The Story of You 
by Julie Myerson.
Cape, 312 pp., £12.99, June 2006, 0 224 07801 1
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... only in response to the guest sliding a finger into a sensor. Nicole is unsettled by the city’s anonymous chic. Myerson comes into her own in her attention to domestic detail and the rhythms of family life, so it is a relief when the narrative returns to London and the family home: I pushed open the pine door into the kitchen and saw black gritty paw ...

Small by Small

Thomas Jones: Uzodinma Iweala’s ‘Beasts of No Nation’, 6 October 2005

Beasts of No Nation 
by Uzodinma Iweala.
Murray, 180 pp., £12.99, August 2005, 0 7195 6752 1
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... Iweala’s short, intense and ambitious first novel, is a rebel soldier in a civil war in an anonymous African country. He has no sense of the cause he is fighting for, or even who his leaders are, beyond his immediate superiors, men he knows only as Commandant and Luftenant. He spends his days ‘walking and fighting and soldiering and ...

Chevril

J.D.F. Jones: Novels on South Africa, 11 November 1999

Ladysmith 
by Giles Foden.
Faber, 366 pp., £9.99, September 1999, 0 571 19733 7
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Manly Pursuits 
by Ann Harries.
Bloomsbury, 340 pp., £15.99, March 1999, 0 7475 4293 7
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... Biographer’, who is recording the war on a prototype cine-camera: although he remains anonymous, he must be W.K.-L. Dickson, the pioneering filmmaker – Foden’s failure to name him may have something to do with the fact that he has an intimately described homosexual relationship with a soldier. To these men, and a subsidiary cast that includes ...