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“... confidence. The New Critics tend to look at classic texts as if they were contemporary and anonymous; with Pritchett, criticism is always busily attentive to history, character and random human traffic. Pritchett’s fiction is like this too – inevitably. He does not feel at ease with the stylised and the exemplary. In his essay on Borges ...”

“... few Tory MPs nowadays who have no business interests or consultancies. In 1988, some heroic and anonymous mole at the merchant bank Morgan Grenfell supplied me with a secret memorandum sent to his colleagues by a director of the bank, David Douglas-Home: ‘As you are all aware,’ Douglas-Home wrote, Andrew MacKay MP advises us on our political strategy ...”

“... of the emotions. ‘There is a sort of vitrifying process that chills all sensibility,’ wrote an anonymous ‘Habituate’ à propos Coleridge in 1876. ‘Whatever is done is done in pale, cold strength of intellect.’ ‘I have not felt anything for twenty years,’ Kavan said not long before her death. The lack of warmth and passion in her work, its ...”

“... about male sexuality. At the end of the book, Alex goes to Hampstead Heath and engages in quick, anonymous sex: he lets a man come over his face. Afterwards, surprised by what he has done, he feels that ‘he had just paid a visit to a remote suburb of himself.’ It is a typically lustrous phrase, but it allows us to realise that the weakness of this novel ...”

“... few surviving sources give any insight into its politics, and one that does is preserved only in anonymous fragments, the tattered scraps of papyrus found at Oxyrhynchus. The Oxyrhynchus historian takes a strong interest in Thebes’ affairs around the time of its sudden switch to a pro-Athenian stance, making it clear that the shift was largely due to a ...”

“... for justice and friendship did not die in vain – that in Benjamin’s phrase, the names of those anonymous men and women will be mentioned in dispatches on Judgment Day. The dead cannot literally be compensated for their suffering, but that suffering can be invested with new significance by our actions in the present. For the moment, then, the meaning of the ...”

“... discussed triaging tools were being used to determine the allocation of intensive care beds. One anonymous doctor is quoted as saying that, in the depths of the first wave, his hospital refused intensive care beds to anyone over 75. The mythology of the NHS as a universal refuge somehow survived, but only because such uncomfortable facts were hidden from ...”

“... Dignitas clinic to put an end to his suffering from motor neurone disease, and who, thanks to some anonymous busybody, had been interviewed by the police under caution. ‘The current law on assisted dying is not working,’ she said, ‘and a huge majority of the public wants to see a change.’ Sumption responded, first, by questioning whether ‘decisions ...”

“... golf. Occasional exercises in this genre have crept into the Christopher Logue selection. The anonymous ode to ‘Lizzie, my Old Car’. I love you though your radiator’s busted, I love you though your gudgeon pins are worn, smacks of the Dragon Book attitude that ‘light’ is synonymous with ‘suitable for children’, and the satire of ‘My Lord ...”

“... you heard the news? If you go to Pakistan you might be whacked.’ The organisers had received an anonymous letter threatening a fatwa and general mayhem if the lectures went ahead. The pretext was a de-contextualised paragraph from my novel The Book of Saladin in which a Christian heretic denounces Islam and its Prophet for being excessively addicted to ...”

“... summer’s posters feature a young couple, children running along the beach behind them, while an anonymous columned temple hovers implausibly in the Aegean haze. Greece, it seems, has no history except ancient history. In Turkey, too, you can swim in the morning, and climb up to the theatre of ancient Pergamon the same afternoon. But how many of those who do ...”

“... in the published corpus by a letter either sent or received.’ We can imagine White’s anonymous editor smiling as he recognises the success of his strategy, but the fact remains that anyone who was anyone had Cicero somewhere within his web. The great majority of the surviving letters are from the last few years of Cicero’s life, as he strove ...”

“... attention to Bentley’s extreme arrogance, so when he defended a reading in Horace’s Odes, the anonymous ‘Bentleian’ annotator added this gloss: The Dr. having called together an Assembly of Criticks, by the Names and Titles of most Learned, most Accurate, most Ingenious, most Judicious, most Illustrious, and so forth, tells them when they are ...”

“... in authorship as a variable of textual definition. Collier painted almanacs, newspapers, anonymous prints. But Wahrman uses biography and intention as his critical frame for talking about Collier’s letter racks, and we feel the limits of the approach. ‘So what was he trying to say?’ Wahrman asks at several points: a strange and diminishing ...”

“... Now traditional institutions like church, chapel and even music hall gave way to the shadowy, anonymous and erotically charged private contemplations of the cinema. By 1939, there were 990 million annual admissions to cinemas across Britain. Les’s Northampton alone had 12 of them. Most working-class teenagers went to the movies once or twice a ...”