On the chance that a shepherd boy …

Edmund White: Gide in Love, 10 December 1998

Andre Gide: A Life in the Present 
by Alan Sheridan.
Hamish Hamilton, 708 pp., £25, October 1998, 0 241 12729 7
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Andre Gide ou la vocation du bonheur. Tome 1, 1869-1911 
by Claude Martin.
Fayard, 699 pp., frs 180, September 1998, 2 213 02309 3
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... of several high-ranking German officials and a French diplomat). In 1918 Gide had published 21 anonymous copies and distributed them to friends. At that point he was still trying not to offend Madeleine, but after she burned his letters he no longer felt bound to protect her reputation or her sensibilities. Corydon was, accordingly, published under his own ...
Still the New World: American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction 
by Philip Fisher.
Harvard, 290 pp., £18.50, May 1999, 0 674 83859 9
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... After a decade or more dominated by special studies of anonymous or bestselling authors now suitable for academic recovery, Philip Fisher’s Still the New World marks a return in some ways to an older and less suspicious idea of ‘classic American literature’. Fisher is a critic who has written extensively on realist prose and painting, and his new book is a commentary on Emerson, Whitman, Melville, James and Twain, among others, with significant asides on Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer ...

Lost Mother

Michael Dobson, 17 February 2000

In My End Is My Beginning: A Life of Mary Queen of Scots 
by James Mackay.
Mainstream, 320 pp., £20, March 1999, 1 84018 058 7
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Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation 
by Jayne Elizabeth Lewis.
Routledge, 259 pp., £14.99, October 1998, 0 415 11481 0
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Ancestry and Narrative in 19th-Century British Literature: Blood Relations from Edgeworth to Hardy 
by Sophie Gilmartin.
Cambridge, 281 pp., £37.50, February 1999, 0 521 56094 2
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... are among our permanent national characteristics. So wrote one of Sir Walter Scott’s anonymous competitors in the preface to The Court of Holyrood: Fragments of an Old Story (1822), neatly describing the emotional dynamic by which narratives about Mary Queen of Scots, such as this historical romance itself, could be used to serve the purposes of ...

Brooke’s Benefit

Anthony Powell, 16 April 1981

... partly because (being in that respect like Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr, for whom ‘the spring was anonymous’) I thought a work much concerned with botany sounded off my beat. Quite fortuitously, I reviewed A Mine of Serpents for the TLS myself, treating it more or less as a novel, which it was to only a very limited extent. There was some excuse for ...

The Devil upon Two Sticks

Charles Nicholl: Samuel Foote, 23 May 2013

Mr Foote’s Other Leg: Comedy, Tragedy and Murder in Georgian London 
by Ian Kelly.
Picador, 462 pp., £18.99, October 2012, 978 0 330 51783 6
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... far outweighed coverage of the concurrent American War of Independence. There also appeared an anonymous, rabidly homophobic pamphlet, Sodom and Onan, almost certainly written by Jackson. Foote was not named, but the title page carried an engraving based on the Reynolds portrait of him, and the work was subtitled ‘A Satire Inscrib’d to ...

‘A Little Feu de Joie’

Adam Shatz: Khomeini rises, 25 April 2013

Days of God: The Revolution in Iran and Its Consequences 
by James Buchan.
John Murray, 482 pp., £25, November 2012, 978 1 84854 066 8
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... At the end of the Second World War, an anonymous pamphlet surfaced in the seminaries of Qom, the bastion of Shia learning. The Unveiling of Secrets accused Iran’s monarchy of treason: ‘In your European hats, you strolled the boulevards, ogling the naked girls, and thought yourselves fine fellows, unaware that foreigners were carting off the country’s patrimony and resources ...

Showing the sights

D.J. Enright, 15 August 1991

The New Oxford Book of 16th-Century Verse 
edited by Emrys Jones.
Oxford, 809 pp., £25, June 1991, 0 19 214126 0
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... to refuse; Barnaby Googe’s unorthodox election of money over friendship; the nicely naughty anonymous ‘Fain would I have a pretty thing’; Marlowe’s Ovid: ‘Thy husband to a banquet goes with me,/ Pray God it may his latest supper be’; and the somewhat Brechtian poem by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford: ‘The mason poor, that builds the lordly ...

That which is spoken

Marina Warner, 8 November 1990

The Virago Book of Fairy-Tales 
edited by Angela Carter.
Virago, 242 pp., £12.99, October 1990, 1 85381 205 6
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Sisters and Strangers: A Moral Tale 
by Emma Tennant.
Grafton, 184 pp., £12.95, July 1990, 0 246 13429 1
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... she wants us to feel here the energy of the oral tradition, and to listen to the voice of the anonymous storyteller, of ‘Mother Goose’, the repository of popular wisdom, who stands aside from the world of letters and learning. ‘The dead know something we don’t,’ Angela Carter writes, ‘although they keep it to themselves.’ She regrets the ...

Mending the curtains

Rosalind Mitchison, 24 January 1991

Naomi Mitchison: A Biography 
by Jill Benton.
Pandora, 192 pp., £15.95, September 1990, 0 04 440460 3
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... work. Publishers jibbed and forced changes on over-explicit phrasing which now seem ridiculous. Anonymous reviewers showed cold hostility. The rules on obscenity had a basic irrationality. They implied the existence of ‘people’, usually envisaged as young girls, totally ignorant of sexual matters but capable of correctly interpreting obscure ...

Diary

Amit Chaudhuri: On Hindu Revivalism, 10 June 1993

... enjoyed being on display. Beyond the cricket green to the right, one could see a steady stream of anonymous commuters hurrying to catch trains, either at the Church-gate station which lay on one side, or the Victoria Terminus on the other. When the bombs went off three weeks later, I was back in Calcutta. Once more, it was BBC Asia that first told us about ...

Cheers

John Lanchester, 8 March 1990

The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer 
by Tom Dardis.
Abacus, 292 pp., £3.99, February 1990, 0 349 10143 4
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... alcoholism embraced throughout The Thirsty Muse. These tenets are those adhered to by Alcoholics Anonymous – Dardis announces that he had attended over a hundred meetings of the organisation – and they include the belief that alcoholism is a disease; that alcoholics have lost all power over alcohol; that, for an alcoholic, loss of control follows from ...

Flaubert’s Bottle

Julian Barnes, 4 May 1989

Flaubert: A Biography 
by Herbert Lottman.
Methuen, 396 pp., £17.95, April 1989, 0 413 41770 0
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... meetings in Paris have to be deduced from his regular lies, the dates of her summer holidays, his anonymous sexual boasting, plus stray hints in letters to his niece. The evidence was remarkably and convincingly assembled in 1980 by Hermia Oliver (Flaubert and an English Governess), on whom Lottman naturally relies. But the simple insertion of Juliet Herbert ...

Felipismo

David Gilmour, 23 November 1989

The Spanish Socialist Party: A History of Factionalism 
by Richard Gillespie.
Oxford, 520 pp., £40, January 1989, 0 19 822798 1
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... pretend that it is always exciting, because the meetings of exiled committees or the activities of anonymous cells during the dictatorship are by their nature unexciting. But it is the history that Spanish socialism needed and deserved. The PSOE’s origins lie in the Madrid printers’ association of the 1870s and in the ascetic, incorruptible figure of its ...

Rough, tough and glamorous

D.A.N. Jones, 24 May 1990

That was business, this is personal: The Changing Faces of Professional Crime 
by Duncan Campbell.
234 pp., £14.95, April 1990, 0 436 19990 4
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... books or advising social workers. Then there are two smoother and more secretive criminals, anonymous, not yet convicted (it seems), both busily dealing in illicit drugs. This is, for Duncan Campbell, an important part of his book: he holds that the Face of Professional Crime is changing, that the Age of the Robber is over and the Age of the Dealer is ...

Mares and Stallions

Tom Wilkie, 18 May 1989

Games, Sex and Evolution 
by John Maynard Smith.
Harvester, 264 pp., £14.95, August 1988, 0 7108 1216 7
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... the science journalists. He is particularly sceptical about television and worries about the anonymous voice-over that accompanies many TV documentaries. The BBC’s flagship science programme, Horizon, for example, employs this technique. Maynard Smith’s criticism is that the viewer does not know whose opinions are being expressed: there is just a ...