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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 ...

Who has the gall?

Frank Kermode: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 8 March 2007

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 
translated by Bernard O’Donoghue.
Penguin, 94 pp., £8.99, August 2006, 0 14 042453 9
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Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 
translated by Simon Armitage.
Faber, 114 pp., £12.99, January 2007, 978 0 571 22327 5
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... occasionally Armitage has done much justice to these 2530 extraordinary lines, and has paid the anonymous poet the tribute of hard poetic labour. O’Donoghue is less sparky but still a very good read. ‘He grabbed the girdle and ungathered its knot/and flung it in fury at the man in front./“My downfall and undoing; let the devil take it,”’ says ...

Your life depends on it

Thomas Jones: Jonathan Raban, 19 October 2006

Surveillance 
by Jonathan Raban.
Picador, 327 pp., £16.99, September 2006, 0 330 41338 4
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... readers presents itself in the form of a cameo appearance by Raban himself, or at any rate by an anonymous writer, ‘a dishevelled-looking, spindle-shouldered older guy in a pink baseball cap that was too young for him’ – which is an accurate enough description of the photograph on the back flap of the novel. One of the ‘six professional stars’ of ...

Diary

Jenny Diski: In New Zealand, 5 August 2004

... everywhere else. On the way to Auckland, I had to change buses. The café at the bus station was anonymous and bleak, like every bus station in the world, but the far wall was a bit special. It was covered in a mural so naive in execution it made Grandma Moses look like Dürer. It depicted the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse galloping out of the wall (if ...

Dire Fury

Shadi Bartsch: Roman Political Theatre, 26 February 2009

‘Octavia’, Attributed to Seneca 
edited by A.J. Boyle.
Oxford, 340 pp., £70, April 2008, 978 0 19 928784 0
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... populi Romani, something paralleled (one could argue) by the respectful treatment of the chorus of anonymous Roman citizens in the play. Unlike the republican Cato, recited by Maternus Curiatus to a Vespasianic audience, the Octavia shared the perspective of those in power in Rome – just as The Capture of Miletus presumably shared the perspective of its ...

Erase, Deface, Transform

Hal Foster: Eduardo Paolozzi, 16 February 2017

Eduardo Paolozzi 
Whitechapel Gallery, until 18 May 2017Show More
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... impinged upon the very centre of the human psyche, through all the senses.’ He offers an ‘anonymous history’ of this impinging through case studies of such devices as the lock and the reaper and such procedures as the production of poultry and pork (which he calls ‘the mechanisation of death’). Giedion drew out two ramifications that Paolozzi ...

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