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Perish the thought

John Redmond: Derek Mahon, 8 February 2001

Selected Poems 
by Derek Mahon.
Penguin, 213 pp., £9.99, November 2000, 0 14 118233 4
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... as bringing a fresh idiom into Irish poetry. Here were poems of the Existentialist outsider, of anonymous points of departure, of endless lonely railway stations and hotel rooms. The critic Brian Donnelly, an early fan, recalls that Mahon’s face – unsmiling and goateed – on the cover of Night-Crossing, seemed to be ‘suggestive of things foreign and ...

Plummeting Deep into Cold Pop

Zachary Leader: Colson Whitehead, 13 December 2001

John Henry Days 
by Colson Whitehead.
Fourth Estate, 389 pp., £12, June 2001, 1 84115 569 1
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... system, by design perhaps, there was little eye contact, and the rest of the team was almost as anonymous as the people whose web pages they worked up.’ Pamela has come to Talcott to scatter her father’s ashes, an act of exorcism as much as fealty, the father’s obsession having cut him off not just from the family but from life in general. J. vaguely ...

Crenellated Heat

Philip Connors: Cormac McCarthy, 25 January 2007

The Road 
by Cormac McCarthy.
Picador, 241 pp., £16.99, November 2006, 9780330447539
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... would never be alike extinguished on the ground behind them. Spectre horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat. Above all else they appeared wholly at venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order. Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute ...

Darwin Won’t Help

Terry Eagleton: Evocriticism, 24 September 2009

On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction 
by Brian Boyd.
Harvard, 540 pp., £25.95, May 2009, 978 0 674 03357 3
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... up with that outrageous oxymoron, a science of subjectivity. At the core of the human subject lay anonymous forces which constituted it all the way through, yet of which it was necessarily oblivious. At the root of human meaning lurk processes that are not in themselves meaningful. Literature could train you to be as exquisitely perceptive as the author of ...

Princess Jasmine strips

Deborah Baker: Saleem Haddad, 16 February 2017

Guapa 
by Saleem Haddad.
Europa Editions, 304 pp., £10.99, October 2016, 978 1 60945 413 5
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... on Terror and the invasion of Iraq. There is none of the edgy and smart electricity of Haddad’s anonymous city here: on the American campus he is satire’s equivalent of a fox in the henhouse. The ideological sink of undergraduate identity politics is nearly as suffocating as the traditional social codes Rasa’s mother contested. Under the deadly narrow ...

Tall Tales

Joanne O’Leary: ‘Jackself’, 1 June 2017

Jackself 
by Jacob Polley.
Picador, 67 pp., £9.99, November 2016, 978 1 4472 9044 5
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... jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile.’ The second epigraph comes from one of the most famous anonymous ballads, ‘Tom O’Bedlam’, to which Jackself returns at the close, with a song in which a bedlamite is ‘summoned’ to journey ‘ten leagues beyond/The wide world’s end’. What is there to find? Wren is hopping on the window ledge come ...

No Bottom to Them

Freya Johnston: Pockets, like Novels, 5 December 2019

The Pocket: A Hidden History of Women’s Lives, 1660-1900 
by Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux.
Yale, 264 pp., £35, May 2019, 978 0 300 23907 2
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... novel is regularly accused of being overstuffed with random items of little value. One anonymous reviewer complained in 1781 that inferior novelists found ‘throwing together’ anything they might ‘pick up’ a ‘convenient method’ of composition.Between the late 17th and early 19th centuries, women’s pockets usually took the form of a bag ...

Plenty of Puff

Charles West: Charlemagne, 19 December 2019

King and Emperor: A New Life of Charlemagne 
by Janet Nelson.
Allen Lane, 704 pp., £30, July 2019, 978 0 7139 9243 4
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... made his Frankish kingdom the dominant power on the continent. In around 799 he was lauded by an anonymous poet as pater Europae, the father of Europe. In more recent times too, the name of Charlemagne has been used to evoke an idea of European integration. Immediately after the Second World War, when historians looked back at Charlemagne across the ...

A Thousand Slayn

Barbara Newman: Ars Moriendi, 5 November 2020

Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England 
by D. Vance Smith.
Chicago, 309 pp., £24, April, 978 0 226 64099 0
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... the dead, but differently, with incommensurable poetics.Few poems are more cryptic than the anonymous early 14th-century ‘Earth upon Earth’, to which Smith devotes an entire chapter:Earth took of earth earth with woeEarth other earth to the earth drewEarth laid earth in earthen troughThen had earth of earth, earth enough.All is reduced to the stuff ...

When was Hippocrates?

James Romm, 22 April 2021

The Invention of Medicine 
by Robin Lane Fox.
Allen Lane, 403 pp., £25, September 2020, 978 0 241 27705 8
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... on the rebuilding done soon after 413; Lane Fox prefers the one c.470. Disputes over the dates of anonymous ancient texts may seem recondite, but Lane Fox leads us down intriguing paths of epigraphy, political history, philology and archaeology. Divagations along the way introduce us to Thasians such as Theogenes, an all-star athlete whose ...

‘Drown her in the Avon’

Colin Kidd: Catharine Macaulay’s Radicalism, 7 September 2023

Catharine Macaulay: Political Writings 
edited by Max Skjönsberg.
Cambridge, 312 pp., £24.99, March, 978 1 009 30744 4
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... surgeon. The spectacular mésalliance generated a lascivious frenzy in print, including an anonymous Bridal Ode on the Marriage of Catherine and Petruchio.Macaulay’s History had attracted the admiration of patriots in the American colonies. She corresponded with Abigail Adams, the wife of John Adams, and with Mercy Otis Warren, later herself to ...

Hayward of the Dale

Mary Wellesley: Gurle Talk, 4 April 2024

Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words 
by Jenni Nuttall.
Virago, 292 pp., £10.99, May, 978 0 349 01531 6
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... change.’ Language was often tidied up by lexicographers and literary texts cleansed. When an anonymous Georgian author published a modernised version of Chaucer’s ‘Miller’s Tale’, the words ‘hole’ and ‘ers’ were replaced with ‘buttock’ and ‘bum’, and Alison’s verdant pubic hair, described by Chaucer as ‘rough and long ...

Short Cuts

Aditya Bahl: Modi’s Setback, 4 July 2024

... taken its cut too, of course. In 2017 it launched an ‘electoral bond’ scheme that allowed for anonymous funding of political parties. By March 2023, 55 per cent of all money donated (65.7 billion rupees, or around £650 million) had flowed directly into the BJP’s coffers. The Congress received less than 10 per cent of donations.The BJP’s commitment to ...

What’s this fork doing?

Andrea Brady: On Alice Notley, 7 September 2023

Early Works 
by Alice Notley.
Fonograf, 321 pp., $20.95, February 2023, 978 1 7378036 3 8
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The Speak Angel Series 
by Alice Notley.
Fonograf, 634 pp., $27.95, February 2023, 978 1 7378036 2 1
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... of characters assembles in her apartment, speaking sometimes as individuals and sometimes as an anonymous collective. ‘This is my life now not a dream It’s as real as this city of Paris.’ Literally? Yes:You can put the universe    and all the souls that exist    in a cigar boxIt’s all in my two-room apartment    everyone seems to ...

Short Cuts

Tom Stevenson: Ready for War?, 26 June 2025

... Richard Knighton, withdrew from an event at the Royal United Services Institute in late March, anonymous military officers told the Times that they had been ‘gagged’ by the government. (Knighton is due to be announced as the new chief of the defence staff.) A neat bureaucratic manoeuvre allowed the SDR to be presented as more of a revitalisation of ...

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