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Comet Mania

Simon Schaffer, 19 February 1981

The comet is coming! 
by Nigel Calder.
BBC, 160 pp., £8.75, November 1980, 0 563 17859 0
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... to comets as the origin of life on Earth in his theory of ‘directed panspermia’; in 1684 the anonymous author of a book called Cometomantia explained that ‘we must expect sickness, diseases, mortality, and more especially the sudden death of Great Ones’, after the passage of a comet; some explained the Great Plague of 1665 by appealing to comets; and ...

Two Sad Russians

Walter Kendrick, 5 September 1985

The Confessions of Victor X 
edited by Donald Rayfield.
Caliban, 143 pp., £7.95, October 1984, 9780904573947
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Novel with Cocaine 
by M. Ageyev, translated by Michael Henry Heim.
Picador, 174 pp., £7.95, February 1985, 0 330 28574 2
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... sex talk bring the rest of life in only as asides. The classic English case is My Secret Life, the anonymous memoir of a Victorian gentleman who carried on a long-term, highly gymnastic sex life that never impinged on the rest of his experience. For him, the value of his recollections lay exclusively in sex; for posterity, it lies in practically everything ...

Making them think

J.I.M. Stewart, 18 September 1986

G.K. Chesterton 
by Michael Ffinch.
Weidenfeld, 369 pp., £16, June 1986, 0 297 78858 2
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... who saw him in Fleet Street in the early 1900s’; and on the following page somebody equally anonymous acclaims the ‘World-Famous Literary Genius, G.K. Chesterton, the World renowned Essayist, Dramatist, Romancist, Poet, Brilliant Epigrammist, Wit, Phrase-maker, the Inspiring Philosopher whose ideas attract, fascinate, impress – make people ...

A Show of Heads

Carlos Fuentes, 19 March 1987

I the Supreme 
by Augusto Roa Bastos, translated by Helen Lane.
Faber, 433 pp., £9.95, March 1987, 0 571 14626 0
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... and Roa Bastos the Paraguayan writer. It begins, literally, with handwriting on the wall: an anonymous pamphleteer has nailed a piece of paper on the door of the Cathedral (shades of Lutheran rebellion!) apocryphally signed by El Supremo, in which the Perpetual Dictator orders that ‘on the occasion of my death my corpse be decapitated, my head placed ...

Liberties

Brigid Brophy, 2 October 1980

Deliberate Regression 
by Robert Harbison.
Deutsch, 264 pp., £8.95, September 1980, 0 233 97273 0
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... Mr Harbison gets it ineffably wrong. The conception of a world beyond subject-matter, and myth as anonymous ambiguity, is met best by music which still bears traces of representation, operas of Wagner, early Strauss, and Debussy. Still? Still bears traces? Only Mr Harbison could have read the history of western music back to front, seeing it presumably, as a ...

Pooh to London

Pat Rogers, 22 December 1983

The Other Side of the Fire 
by Alice Thomas Ellis.
Duckworth, 156 pp., £7.95, November 1983, 0 7156 1809 1
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London Tales 
edited by Julian Evans.
Hamish Hamilton, 309 pp., £8.95, October 1983, 0 241 11123 4
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Londoners 
by Maureen Duffy.
Methuen, 240 pp., £7.95, October 1983, 0 413 49350 4
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Good Friends, Just 
by Anne Leaton.
Chatto, 152 pp., £7.95, September 1983, 0 7011 2710 4
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... dreadful occasions at the Arts Council and local radio stations (there is also, pointlessly anonymous, the London Library again). But Maureen Duffy wants to sing a song of greater significance, and she has Jake working on a script about Villon. The translations are not bad, but the poet himself is sentimentalised out of recognition; and he’s there as ...

Diary

Alan Sheridan: Regarding Foucault, 19 July 1984

... intellectual history, the resurrection of long-forgotten ones, and the salvaging of vast tracts of anonymous discourse. Foucault always claimed that the past, as such, did not interest him: he was writing the history of the present. This was undoubtedly one of the predispositions that governed his outlook. It assumed many forms and sometimes had a surprisingly ...

Monsieur Montaillou

Rosalind Mitchison, 7 August 1980

The Territory of the Historian 
by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, translated by Sian Ben.
Harvester, 346 pp., £12.50, May 1979, 0 85527 565 0
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Montaillou 
by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, translated by Barbara Bray.
Penguin, 382 pp., £2.50, May 1980, 0 14 005471 5
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Carnival: a People’s Uprising in Romans, 1579-1580 
by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, translated by Mary Feeney.
Scolar, 426 pp., £12.50, May 1980, 0 85967 591 2
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... into action by an unusually active and conscientious bishop; Carnival on two accounts, one of them anonymous, of the events of 1579-80 in and around the city. The books contain comments on these sources, and on one aspect of the Carnival story one of the sources is skilfully used to get behind the silences and bias of the other, but there is no systematic ...

That’s Liquor!

Nick James, 7 March 1996

Leaving Las Vegas 
directed by Mike Figgis.
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... action. But Ben is determined to avoid the sentimental traps of the drunkard’s den: his room is anonymous and new to him, he has burnt all his photographs, and he flaunts his trolley-load of famous brands. Sera is a welcome accident, come too late, a premonition of the bliss of for getfulness. They are, like Frankie and Johnny, heroes of a long, drunken ...

Homeroidal

Bernard Knox, 11 May 1995

The Husbands: An Account of Books III and IV of Homer’s ‘Iliad’ 
by Christopher Logue.
Faber, 55 pp., £6.99, October 1994, 0 571 17198 2
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... join Paris in his bed after his narrow escape. The tale is told by Cumin, who supplies Homer’s anonymous old woman with a name – Teethee. Helen soon realises that she is speaking to the goddess and, as in Homer, bitterly upbraids her. But in somewhat different terms. Like any wife to any husband, she threatens to walk out. ‘Tu, Cumin, pack./Make sure ...

Falling for Desmoulins

P.N. Furbank, 20 August 1992

A Place of Greater Safety 
by Hilary Mantel.
Viking, 896 pp., £15.99, September 1992, 0 670 84545 0
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... last he had, of the old sort. “A happy new year to you too, Dr Marat,” he said.’ Even the anonymous narrator, who often intervenes to paint the scene or keep up to date with events, is inclined to be ‘superior’ and jokey. VERSAILLES: a great deal of hard thinking has gone into this procession. It isn’t just a matter of getting up and ...

Networking

Thomas Healy, 11 February 1993

Living Dangerously: Young Offenders in their Own Words 
by Roger Graef.
HarperCollins, 262 pp., £14.99, January 1993, 0 00 215967 8
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... they would rather be in prison. Graef is sympathetic, and before long you begin to doubt him. An anonymous judge, speaking to him, wishes that ‘transportation were still available’. ‘I’d like nothing better than to take one of these youngsters who’s reappeared for the umpteenth car theft and say: “You’re a thoroughly bad sort. Off you go to ...

Eels Tomorrow, but Sprats Today

Peter Parsons, 18 September 1997

Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens 
by James Davidson.
HarperCollins, 372 pp., £25, June 1997, 0 00 255591 3
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... who consumed a three-foot octopus (except for the head), and nearly died of dyspepsia; the anonymous alcoholic immortalised by Aristotle, who put eggs under his mat and sat on them and drank continuously until they hatched. Not many readers nowadays will need the reminder that the Greeks were not all mind and marble. Davidson, however, presents them as ...

Outside Swan and Edgar’s

Matthew Sweet: The life of Oscar Wilde, 5 February 1998

The Wilde Album 
by Merlin Holland.
Fourth Estate, 192 pp., £12.99, October 1997, 1 85702 782 5
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Cosmopolitan Criticism: Oscar Wilde’s Philosophy of Art 
by Julia Prewitt Brown.
Virginia, 157 pp., $30, September 1997, 9780813917283
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The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde 
edited by Peter Raby.
Cambridge, 307 pp., £37.50, October 1997, 9780521474719
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Wilde The Novel 
by Stefan Rudnicki.
Orion, 215 pp., £5.99, October 1997, 0 7528 1160 6
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Oscar Wilde 
by Frank Harris.
Robinson, 358 pp., £7.99, October 1997, 1 85487 126 9
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Moab is my Washpot 
by Stephen Fry.
Hutchinson, 343 pp., £16.99, October 1997, 0 09 180161 3
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Nothing … except My Genius 
by Oscar Wilde.
Penguin, 82 pp., £2.99, October 1997, 0 14 043693 6
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... Victorian England’. The Marquess of Queensberry, Sir Edward Carson, Max Nordau and the gloating, anonymous readership of small-minded newspapers like the Daily Mail: these are the villains of the Wilde story, but they may have more in common with us than its hero. Homophobia, for instance, is a modern phenomenon: before Wilde, there was really no such figure ...

Hospitalism

Sarah Perry: Victorian ‘Hospitalism’, 5 July 2018

The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine 
by Lindsey Fitzharris.
Allen Lane, 304 pp., £16.99, October 2017, 978 0 241 26249 8
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... folly, and Fitzharris – with an eye for the narrative arc – recounts the humbling of her hero. Anonymous letters to newspapers accused Lister of intellectual theft. His methods were denounced as ‘obsolete and inelegant’. In a broadside reminiscent of those levelled at Darwin, one opponent castigated Lister for portraying nature as ‘some murderous hag ...

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