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Napping in the Athenaeum

Jonathan Parry: London Clubland, 8 September 2022

Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members’ Clubs 
by Seth Alexander Thévoz.
Robinson, 367 pp., £25, July, 978 1 4721 4646 5
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... anniversary of Anthony Sampson’s Anatomy of Britain, which gave a pioneering analysis of the ‘anonymous institutions’ that seemed to be running the country, and the relations between them. It was the most famous of several books published in the early 1960s exploring the idea of a British ‘Establishment’, as part of a discussion about failure in ...
A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud and Sabina Spielrein 
by John Kerr.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 608 pp., £25, February 1994, 1 85619 249 0
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... He could not afford a public scandal. In the following January, Spielrein’s mother received an anonymous letter advising her to look to her daughter. She wrote to Jung, whose answer implied – plainly, whether truthfully or otherwise – that he had not had sexual relations with Sabina. He concluded on a professional note: his normal fee was ten francs ...

Things I Said No To

Michael Wood: Italo Calvino, 17 April 2003

Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings 
by Italo Calvino.
Cape, 255 pp., £16.99, January 2003, 0 224 06132 1
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... well in hotel rooms,’ Calvino says in the title-piece of this volume, in that kind of abstract, anonymous space which hotel rooms are, where I find myself facing the blank page, with no alternative, no escape. Or perhaps this is an idealised condition which worked most of all when I was younger, and the world was there just outside the door, packed with ...

The Need for Buddies

Roy Porter, 22 June 2000

British Clubs and Societies 1580-1800: The Origins of an Associational World 
by Peter Clark.
Oxford, 516 pp., £60, January 2000, 0 19 820376 4
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... environment of the club, which catered particularly well to socially mobile newcomers lost in the anonymous urban scramble: Men feel their weakness, and to numbers run, Themselves to strengthen or themselves to shun; The need for buddies, identified by George Crabbe, explains why the English club was homosocial through and through, serving as it did to ...

In the Studebaker

Laura Quinney: ‘With a stink and a stink’, 23 October 2003

Moy Sand and Gravel 
by Paul Muldoon.
Faber, 90 pp., £14.99, October 2003, 0 571 21535 1
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... Series) and Arnold’s friend Fanny Brice. Contrasted with these somewhat comical figures are the anonymous victims of persecution: the ‘child-kin’ from Poland in the 1930s, interrogated by a ‘peaked cap’, and the Holocaust dead, recalled in the image of ‘smoke . . . fling[ing] and flail[ing] itself . . . from a crematorium/at Auschwitz’ and in ...

Imbalance

Michael Hofmann: The Charm of Hugo Williams, 22 May 2003

Collected Poems 
by Hugo Williams.
Faber, 288 pp., £20, September 2002, 0 571 21233 6
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... may be poetry’s Peter Pan, but he is also its St Sebastian.) The necessarily rather anonymous ‘I’ of the early poems becomes a fully developed character, very close to the poet, a habitual fall-guy for the poems, like the further alter ego, ‘Sonny Jim’. A lot of 1980s and 1990s Williams barely pretends to be poetry. The poems straggle ...

Performances for Sleepless Tyrants

Marina Warner: ‘Tales of the Marvellous’, 8 January 2015

Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange 
translated by Malcolm Lyons, introduced by Robert Irwin.
Penguin, 600 pp., £25, November 2014, 978 0 14 139503 6
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... mystic and author of The Conference of the Birds – a very different literary creature from the anonymous author/compiler of Tales of the Marvellous. The translator, Malcolm Lyons, has rendered these stories with brio, but has kept close to the text – he hasn’t tried to patch up non sequiturs, repetition, mistakes of continuity, and he keeps the ...

Too Glorious for Words

Bernard Porter: Lawrence in Arabia, 3 April 2014

Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East 
by Scott Anderson.
Atlantic, 592 pp., £25, March 2014, 978 1 78239 199 9
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... that contrasted with ‘the endless casualty lists and the sheer horror of mechanised, muddy, anonymous death’ on the Western Front. It also corresponded with Lawrence’s notion of medieval warfare and offered him scope for the kind of ‘heroism’ he had craved for himself ever since his adolescent reading of Greek and medieval epics: knightly ...

This Strange Speech

Christopher S. Wood: Early Dürer, 18 July 2013

The Early Dürer 
edited by Daniel Hess and Thomas Eser, translated by Lance Anderson et al.
Thames and Hudson, 604 pp., £40, August 2012, 978 0 500 97037 9
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... brilliant portraits of other Nurembergers. At the same time he was courting a far-flung and anonymous public who ultimately brought him much greater fame than any previous German artist: the consumers of woodcuts and engravings. In these works Dürer depicted familiar sacred stories, including the lives of Christ and the Virgin, as well as such esoteric ...

Evil Just Is

Diarmaid MacCulloch: The Italian Inquisition, 13 May 2010

The Italian Inquisition 
by Christopher Black.
Yale, 330 pp., £35, November 2009, 978 0 300 11706 6
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... called Elia Capriolo, angrily reproaching the Dominican inquisitors of his city in a sensibly anonymous pamphlet of 1505: You seize from the Valcamonica certain old women who are stupid and frozen in a kind of mental daze, and you interrogate them about their faith, the Trinity, and other such topics. You bring in scribes and drag out proceedings; you ...

Exhibitionists

Hal Foster: Curation, 4 June 2015

Ways of Curating 
by Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Penguin, 192 pp., £9.99, March 2015, 978 0 241 95096 8
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Curationism: How Curating Took Over the Art World – And Everything Else 
by David Balzer.
Pluto, 140 pp., £8.99, April 2015, 978 0 7453 3597 1
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... of one. This is implicit not only in his hectic meeting and greeting but also in his semi-anonymous prose, which calls to mind the language of a collective Wiki-brain. For a Bildungsroman of a kind, Ways of Curating doesn’t display much personality; Obrist is rather like Warhol in this regard (certainly they share a compulsion to record), a cipher ...

Wandering Spooks

David Simpson: Vietnam’s Ghosts, 14 August 2008

Ghosts of War in Vietnam 
by Heonik Kwon.
Cambridge, 222 pp., £25, March 2008, 978 0 521 88061 9
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... on the burning deck in her most famous poem, ‘Casabianca’, but also in her attention to the anonymous and unmarked spaces of empire where bodies vanished beneath the waves or wasted away on the desert sands, uncommemorated and unnoticed. Such diminished spirits might justifiably continue to make claims on the living. The sheer scale of the destruction ...

When to Read Was to Write

Leah Price: Marginalia in Renaissance England, 9 October 2008

Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England 
by William Sherman.
Pennsylvania, 259 pp., £29.50, April 2008, 978 0 8122 4043 6
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... of a book (if they can be attributed to a famous person) or detract from it (if they belong to an anonymous student with a highlighter). In fact, Sherman points out, a 16th-century book could be described (in a 1952 sale catalogue) as ‘rather soiled by use’ and (in a 1953 exhibition catalogue) as ‘well and piously used’, with ‘marginal notations in ...

Pick the small ones

Marina Warner: Girls Are Rubbish, 17 February 2005

Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet: Women in Proverbs from around the World 
by Mineke Schipper.
Yale, 422 pp., £35, April 2004, 0 300 10249 6
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... definition of the proverb ignores the issue of gnomes, but her restrictions – a proverb must be anonymous, unauthored, the product of a group – still do not entirely account for her literary omissions: Shakespeare was a brilliant Mass-Observationist of imagery and language, with unsurpassed recording powers, and A Thousand and One Nights was compiled from ...

Two Spots and a Bubo

Hugh Pennington: Use soap and water, 21 April 2005

Return of the Black Death: The World’s Greatest Serial Killer 
by Susan Scott and Christopher Duncan.
Wiley, 310 pp., £16.99, May 2004, 0 470 09000 6
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The Great Plague: The Story of London’s Most Deadly Year 
by Lloyd Moote and Dorothy Moote.
Johns Hopkins, 357 pp., £19.95, April 2004, 0 8018 7783 0
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Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World’s Most Dangerous Disease 
by Wendy Orent.
Free Press, 276 pp., £17.99, May 2004, 0 7432 3685 8
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... workers leaving ‘Diamond City’ as fast as they could. The doctors had already gone. An anonymous, highly placed official was quoted in the Hindustan Times as saying: ‘We already know that the Surat strain was not Indian. We cannot rule out the possibility of militants purchasing the organism from a Kazakhstan company and releasing it in ...

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