Search Results

“... to build St Petersburg, and it’s hard to say which was deadlier. Tens of thousands found their anonymous ends in the swamps of the Neva delta, whose islands enjoyed a reputation similar to today’s Gulag ... The universal coercion exercised by the future Bronze Horseman united the nation for the first time and gave birth to the Russian totalitarianism ...”

“... of his drinking. And while he recalls the details of his recovery – he went to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and was sober from 1947 – he doesn’t link his own alcoholism to his father’s, or discuss the fact that for the first half of his life, the sexual conquests he was so thorough in documenting all took place when he was half-cut. In 1949 ...”

“... my moan.’Lyrics in women’s voices also celebrated erotic pleasure. In a brief anonymous verse from around 1300, a maiden complains that her lover can’t satisfy her: ‘Alas, that he so soon fell!’ In a 15th-century carol, a woman describes her snappily dressed boyfriend in loving detail, lingering over his trim shirt and coat, his hose ...”

“... commuting in cars that double as personal offices and trash receptacles, going to McDonald’s or anonymous coffee shops and diners and, most of all, going to work: ‘I was a flask-shaped man in a velour shirt sitting at long lunchroom tables in business schools, cosmetology schools, junior colleges, community colleges. My business was buying used textbooks ...”

“... the region.Morocco’s defeat of the Songhay empire is often portrayed as an attack on Islam. An anonymous contemporary writer said the Moroccans were ‘barbarous invaders’ and ‘bloodthirsty criminals’ who had no feeling for ‘the community of faith’. Sultan Ahmad Al Mansur, who ordered the expedition from his seat in Marrakesh, was said to rejoice ...”

“... science in opposition to the narrow specialisms that Poe saw hardening around him. It built on the anonymous and scandalous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), which had proposed a universe evolved out of diffuse clouds of matter, dispensing with a divine creator in favour of universal mechanical laws. It took inspiration from Alexander von ...”

“... mercurial character remained a source of bafflement to her Continental cousins. In 1678 the anonymous author of A Letter from Amsterdam to a Friend in England described it as ‘either the floating island, or founded upon quicksilver’. England’s unease is also conveyed by Devil-Land’s front cover, a detail from a Jacobean charter, which shows a ...”

“... fob. Fleeing the feminised work that maintains the ‘macabre bourgeois house’, Hazel occupies anonymous and dirty chambres de bonne: ‘No need, no contract, no seduction: just the free promiscuity of a disrobed mind.’ She reads, drinks beer for lunch and embraces impersonal relationships. ‘I would go to kiss in a park all afternoon because that was ...”

“... military airfield in Saka in the summer, destroyed or damaged a large number of Russian warplanes. Anonymous Ukrainian officials said at the time that their country’s special forces had done the job. But had they? In an unusual essay in September, Ukraine’s revered military commander in chief, Valery Zaluzhny, claimed that the airfield had actually been ...”

“... the others will sing’). Encoded here is the recognition that everyday people often create anonymous culture that we ‘experience as an artwork, as chanter,’ and that he, ‘Kurt Schwitters, is the artist of the work of autres’: ‘I am the artist, who, through an act of delimitation, turned the song of others (which might be very bad) into an ...”

“... 12th-century poet Marie de France and the sublime Julian of Norwich – others may lurk behind the anonymous female-voiced lyrics in Old and Middle English. Wellesley devotes a few intriguing pages to a 15th-century Welsh-language poet, Gwerful Mechain, whose diverse oeuvre ranges from religious verses to an ‘Ode to the Vagina’ and a savage stanza ...”

“... knowing and kill him painlessly at the right moment. The ultimate fantasy here would be that an anonymous state institution would do this for us without our knowledge. Again the question surfaces, however, of whether or not we know that the Other knows. The way to a perfect totalitarian society is open. What is false is the underlying premise: that the ...”

“... here – the Lindisfarne Gospels; ‘No surviving manuscript’ from Whitby, where an anonymous monk wrote the first life of Gregory the Great; nothing from Breedon-on-the-Hill in Leicestershire. Was all this the fault of the Vikings, as King Alfred seems to say in his preface to ‘Pastoral Care’? He recalls seeing ‘how the churches ...”

“... meant a great deal to me then, especially in connection with the transition I was making, from the anonymous itinerant at University College London to the aspiring writer with secret ambitions. It was in Bandra, too, that I discovered, as did my parents, the desire to return to the city proper in which I’d grown up and which I’d always wanted to ...”

“... moi, la science c’est nous,’ as the French physiologist Claude Bernard put it. Images of anonymous medieval masons building a cathedral or social insects sacrificing themselves for the good of the hive form a refrain in mid 19th-century writing about the scientific life. Fitzroy compared himself to an ant carrying its mite to the hoard. All the ...”