Caesar’s body shook

Denis Feeney: Cicero, 22 September 2011

Cicero in Letters: Epistolary Relations of the Late Republic 
by Peter White.
Oxford, 235 pp., £40, August 2010, 978 0 19 538851 0
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... 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 ...

Pissing on Idiots

Colin Burrow: Extreme Editing, 6 October 2011

Richard Bentley: Poetry and Enlightenment 
by Kristine Louise Haugen.
Harvard, 333 pp., £29.95, April 2011, 978 0 674 05871 2
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... 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 ...

Quill, Wax, Knife

Adam Smyth: Collier’s Letter Racks, 18 July 2013

Mr Collier’s Letter Racks: A Tale of Art & Illusion at the Threshold of the Modern Information Age 
by Dror Wahrman.
Oxford, 275 pp., £22.95, November 2012, 978 0 19 973886 1
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... 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 ...

Gosh oh gee

Alan Allport: ‘Being Boys’, 21 November 2013

Being Boys: Youth, Leisure and Identity in the Interwar Years 
by Melanie Tebbutt.
Manchester, 352 pp., £75, February 2012, 978 0 7190 6613 9
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... 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 ...

Whose Body?

Charles Glass: ‘Operation Mincemeat’, 22 July 2010

Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story that Changed the Course of World War Two 
by Ben Macintyre.
Bloomsbury, 400 pp., £16.99, January 2010, 978 0 7475 9868 8
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... in all other respects this is the true story of “Major William Martin”.’ The body remains anonymous in the film, but one scene in a small hospital in St John’s Wood has Montagu meeting the unnamed father of a young man whose body lies under a sheet. The father asks: ‘Can you assure me, Commander Montagu, as an officer and a gentleman, that if I ...

Too Many Pears

Thomas Keymer: Frances Burney, 27 August 2015

The Court Journals and Letters of Frances Burney 1786-91, Vols III-IV: 1788 
edited by Lorna Clark.
Oxford, 824 pp., £225, September 2014, 978 0 19 968814 2
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... anxiety, even panic, revived the trauma of the publication of Evelina, when her attempt to remain anonymous was thwarted. She had been unmasked in print by a minor satirist named George Huddesford, and was ‘shocked, mortified, grieved and confounded’ by the experience. At one point in the diary she draws on the language of the Confession of Sin (‘one ...

He saw, he wanted

Jenny Diski: Murder at Wrotham Hill, 8 November 2012

Murder at Wrotham Hill 
by Diana Souhami.
Quercus, 325 pp., £18.99, September 2012, 978 0 85738 283 2
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... spree, have an unpleasant arbitrariness to them. ‘The background was not domesticity, but the anonymous life of the dance-halls and the false values of the American film.’ Orwell uses the words ‘wanton’ and ‘callousness’: ‘There is no depth of feeling in it.’ In October 1946, eight months after Orwell’s only partly humorous complaint about ...

Diary

Andrew Saint: Foscolo’s Grave, 20 September 2007

... and was escorted back in it after Trafalgar for solemn interment in St Paul’s. In the bleak, anonymous new cemeteries beyond human habitation, by contrast, rabid dogs would root up and mingle the bones of the virtuous with those of executed criminals. And much more to what might be preposterous effect, were it not for Foscolo’s compact and energetic ...

Glorious and Most Glorious City of the Oxyrhinchites

Christopher Kelly: Roman Egypt, 21 February 2008

City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish: Greek Lives in Roman Egypt 
by Peter Parsons.
Phoenix, 312 pp., £9.99, December 2007, 978 0 7538 2233 3
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... Here a report from a Doctor Heron on a cavalry officer with a wounded left buttock. Here an anonymous sufferer from shivering-fits. Here a corpse found in a vineyard ‘stretched out by the palm tree and mutilated by dogs’. Here an extensive pharmacopoeia. Here a remedy for nosebleeds: ‘mix powdered frankincense with leek juice and smear the juice ...

Seven Miles per Hour

Robert Macfarlane: The men who invented flight, 5 February 2004

First to Fly: The Unlikely Triumph of Wilbur and Orville Wright 
by James Tobin.
Murray, 431 pp., £9.99, November 2003, 0 7195 5738 0
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The Wright Brothers: The Aviation Pioneers who Changed the World 
by Ian Mackersey.
Little, Brown, 554 pp., £20, October 2003, 0 316 86144 8
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Wings of Madness: Alberto Santos-Dumont and the Invention of Flight 
by Paul Hoffman.
Fourth Estate, 369 pp., £18.99, June 2003, 1 84115 368 0
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Taking Flight: Inventing the Aerial Age from Antiquity to the First World War 
by Richard Hallion.
Oxford, 531 pp., £20, September 2003, 0 19 516035 5
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... notebook that a ‘lovely glittering aeroplane’ had passed overhead. Around the same time, an anonymous French soldier saw an artillery-spotting German Taube puttering past. ‘There is that wretched bird which haunts us,’ he noted. No longer could aircraft be uncomplicatedly adored. Both Hoffman and Tobin glide over the details of the role of aircraft ...

Fumbling for the Towel

Christopher Prendergast: Maigret’s elevation to the Panthéon, 7 July 2005

Romans: Tome I 
by Georges Simenon.
Gallimard, 1493 pp., €60, May 2004, 2 07 011674 3
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Romans: Tome II 
by Georges Simenon.
Gallimard, 1736 pp., €60, May 2004, 2 07 011675 1
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... Maison du canal), and certainly not of the ‘heroic’ type. For the most part they lead humdrum, anonymous lives in some backwater or other (a provincial town, the suburbs, the forgotten quartiers of the capital). Even when they travel to distant places – the hero of Le Coup de lune goes to the Belgian Congo – the encountered reality is unrelievedly ...

Bad Shepherd

Robert Crawford: James Hogg, 5 April 2001

The Collected Works of James Hogg. Vol. VIII: The ‘Spy’ 
edited by Gillian Hughes.
Edinburgh, 641 pp., £60, March 2000, 9780748613656
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... Robertson thought that the countryman Hogg was simply being used as a go-between by the real, anonymous editor of the Spy, and Hogg was happy to adopt this role. In the magazine itself, he developed his ‘Spy’ persona. The Spy is presented as an elderly Highland bachelor only recently arrived in Edinburgh. He is a failed preacher, failed farmer, failed ...

What is to be done?

Dan Jacobson: Death and memory in Russia, 4 January 2001

Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia 
by Catherine Merridale.
Granta, 506 pp., £25, October 2000, 1 86207 374 0
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... parents, grandparents, children, siblings, friends, fellow soldiers, fellow prisoners, neighbours, anonymous persons whose lives crossed their own. The book depends heavily on extracts from more than a hundred formal and informal interviews conducted by the author, as well as various impromptu conversations she overheard or in which she took ...

‘I intend to support white rule’

Ian Hamilton: Allen Tate, 24 May 2001

Allen Tate: Orphan of the South 
by Thomas Underwood.
Princeton, 447 pp., £21.95, December 2000, 0 691 06950 6
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... Tate’s poems was unvaryingly sonorous/ poetic and his verse persona tended always to the bardic/anonymous; his work on the whole is suspiciously susceptible to ‘explication’ – a discipline, it should be said, at which Tate thoroughly excelled, especially when his own texts were the topic for discussion. For him, the cry was: No things but in ...

Love Story

Susan Watkins: Rosa Luxemburg, 21 February 2002

Rosa Luxemburg: An Intimate Portrait 
by Mathilde Jacob, translated by Hans Fernbach.
Lawrence and Wishart, 143 pp., £9.99, May 2000, 0 85315 900 9
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... of my cage’. Her closest colleagues (Zetkin, Franz Mehring, Leo Jogiches) recognised that Jacob, anonymous and reliable, was better suited than any of them to play the role of official prison visitor. Tersely, Jacob explains her own dedication: ‘If there was anything to be done for her, my motto was, “enough is not enough.”’ Such a love does not ...