Out of this World

David Armitage, 16 November 1995

Utopia 
by Thomas More, edited by George Logan, Robert M. Adams and Clarence Miller.
Cambridge, 290 pp., £55, February 1995, 0 521 40318 9
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Utopias of the British Enlightenment 
edited by Gregory Claeys.
Cambridge, 305 pp., £35, July 1994, 0 521 43084 4
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... foreshadowings of the gulags. More’s Utopians would have recognised the sumptuary laws of the anonymous Island of Content (1709) and James Burgh’s Account of the Cessares (1764), the rotation of office and minimal laws of William Hodgson’s Commonwealth of Reason (1795) and the natural religion shared by most of these ideal commonwealths. They might ...

Snookered

Peter Campbell, 30 November 1995

Shadows and Enlightenment 
by Michael Baxandall.
Yale, 192 pp., £19.95, June 1995, 0 300 05979 5
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... still lifes, painted in the controlled environment of the studio, have none of the smooth, anonymous finish which became common in 19th-century academic painting – what Baxandall calls the ‘licked trickery of trompe l’oeil’. But they do have an extraordinary verisimilitude, which seems to come from a highly ‘backtracked’ account of what the ...

Diary

Elaine Showalter: Even Lolita must have read Nancy Drew, 7 September 1995

... Gertrude Stein, whom she found obnoxious and overbearing, and in the mid-Twenties contributed an anonymous autobiographical essay to a series in the Nation which was entitled ‘These Modern Women’. There’s virtually nothing about the Maida books in Irwin’s papers at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard. But as a child I identified with them with the ...

Female Heads

John Bayley, 27 October 1988

Woman to Woman: Female Friendship in Victorian Fiction 
by Tess Cosslett.
Harvester, 211 pp., £29.95, July 1988, 0 7108 1015 6
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Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century 
by John Mullan.
Oxford, 261 pp., £25, June 1988, 0 19 812865 7
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The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney. Vol. I: 1768-1773 
edited by Lars Troide.
Oxford, 353 pp., £45, June 1988, 9780198125815
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... out, there are many records of prolonged and loving female friendships in the 18th century, and anonymous independent women by the score who depended on each other’s society, but apart from stylised Utopias and parodies, like Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, there are no explorations of the topic, although one should add, thinking of the role of ...

Magnanimous Cuckolds

Jack Matthews, 10 November 1988

The Lyre of Orpheus 
by Robertson Davies.
Viking, 472 pp., £11.95, September 1988, 9780670824168
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... 16th-century masterpiece. The Marriage at Cana, hitherto assigned to some anonymous ‘Alchemical Master’: this discovery is one of the major satisfactions for the reader who has read the works of the trilogy in the order of their publication. This is not the same, however, as the chronological order of the events they describe. The ...

Make me work if you can

T.H. Breen, 18 February 1988

Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718-1775 
by Roger Ekirch.
Oxford, 277 pp., £25, November 1987, 0 19 820092 7
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... migrants who crossed the Atlantic as indentured servants. It was easy, I suppose, to take these anonymous individuals for granted. They fit conveniently into a mythology in which the poor of the Old World become prosperous in the New. To be sure, just enough migrants clambered up the social ladder to give credibility to the notion that colonial America was ...

Meltings

Nicholas Penny, 18 February 1988

Painting as an Art 
by Richard Wollheim.
Thames and Hudson, 384 pp., £28, November 1987, 0 500 23495 7
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... to be completely wrong after centuries of acceptance. Portraits of Macchiavelli turn out to be of anonymous merchants, paintings by Rembrandt turn out to be by his imitators, and the copy in the basement turns out to be by Raphael. Like all of us, Wollheim has been deeply affected by the reputations which certain painters enjoy – reputations reflected in ...

Top Grumpy’s Top Hate

Robert Irwin: Richard Aldington’s Gripes, 18 February 1999

Richard Aldington and Lawrence of Arabia: A Cautionary Tale 
by Fred Crawford.
Southern Illinois, 265 pp., £31.95, July 1998, 0 8093 2166 1
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Lawrence the Uncrowned King of Arabia 
by Michael Asher.
Viking, 419 pp., £20, October 1998, 0 670 87029 3
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... was echoed by his admirer and biographer, the military historian, Basil Liddell Hart, although an anonymous reviewer of Anthony Nutting’s Lawrence of Arabia: The Man and the Motive in the TLS was to mock this notion that all wars could be won by adopting Lawrence’s tactics: ‘No one ever defeated an enemy by avoiding him: all that can be done by avoiding ...

I want, I shall have

Graham Robb, 17 February 2000

La Grand Thérèse or The Greatest Swindle of the Century 
by Hilary Spurling.
Profile, 128 pp., £7.99, September 1999, 9781861971326
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... handed 100,000 francs and allowed to escape by the back door. The intrepid M. Quelquejay and the anonymous wrecker were exceptions. Most of the Humberts’ creditors were helpless puppets, worked by the sinister hand of Thérèse’s brother, Romain. While Thérèse herself destroyed lives at a distance and kept a record of her successes in a carnet de ...

White Slaves

Christopher Driver, 3 March 1983

Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight against White Slavery, 1870-1939 
by Edward Bristow.
Oxford, 340 pp., £15, November 1982, 0 19 822588 1
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Peasants, Rebels and Outcastes 
by Mikiso Hane.
Scolar, 297 pp., £12.50, October 1982, 0 85967 670 6
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... unemployment succumb to prostitution. The medical educationalist Abraham Flexner – evidently the anonymous ‘student’ whom Theodore Dreiser mentions in his introduction to Londres’s book – spent two years at John D. Rockefeller’s request compiling his report on Prostitution in Europe (1914). Returning to the topic in his autobiography a ...

Diary

Neal Ascherson: On A.J.P. Taylor, 2 June 1983

... which he refused even to discuss with them. Now I hear that a sensational document from an anonymous ‘top Chinese source’, purporting to give the full inside story of the Lin Biao affair, has been paid for somewhere in Gray’s Inn Road. Cash first, verification later.If the British have found the whole Hitler diary business funny, the West Germans ...

Exact Walking

Christopher Hill, 19 June 1980

Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 
by R.T. Kendall.
Oxford, 252 pp., £12.50, February 1980, 0 19 826716 9
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... men would be ‘tormented for ever without end for a little time of sinning in this world’. The anonymous author of Tyranipocrit Discovered remarked that ‘faith no doubt is a comfortable thing for him that hath it, but another’s faith cannot help me. But if I be poor and want food and raiment, if my rich neighbour do love me, although he do not believe ...

Security

Elspeth Davie, 19 February 1981

... joints of giant insects, while the glittering anonymity of the head in its helmet resembled the anonymous heads of astronauts in the photos further on. The clumsy cannonballs, even the slow-swinging guns had done the job at the time. The shelves of inlaid pistols in their glass case were his special pride. As for the rocket missiles with their pearl-smooth ...

Poetry and Soda

Barbara Everett, 5 February 1981

The Penguin Book of Unrespectable Verse 
edited by Geoffrey Grigson.
Penguin, 335 pp., £1.75, November 1980, 0 14 042142 4
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The Penguin Book of Light Verse 
edited by Gavin Ewart.
Penguin, 639 pp., £9.50, October 1980, 0 14 042270 6
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... passed, with grave discourse Of who fucks who and who does worse – immediately followed by an anonymous love-poem in thieves’ or beggars’ slang, ‘The Maunder’s Praise of his Strowling Mort’ – Doxy, oh! thy glaziers shine   As glimmars by the Salomon! – and that, by William Walsh’s namby-pamby pseudo-pastoral, ‘The Despairing ...

Imperial Dope

Alan Hollinghurst, 4 June 1981

Creation 
by Gore Vidal.
Heinemann, 510 pp., £8.95, April 1981, 0 394 50015 6
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... Vidal’s impersonality and Cyrus will appear as another device of anonymity, a mask regrettably anonymous in itself. One recalls how Anaïs Nin failed to make Vidal abandon his masks or enrich his sensuality, and sees the result in a literary personality which is both distanced and narcissistic. Much could be accepted if Creation were not so grandiose, and ...