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Sent East

James Wood: Sebald’s ‘Austerlitz’, 6 October 2011

... nice joke, because Penrith-Smith combines both an English place-name, and the most anonymous, least curious surname in English) has told Jacques that he is not called Dafydd Elias but Jacques Austerlitz. Jacques asks, with the enforced politeness of the English schoolboy, ‘Excuse me, sir, but what does it mean?’ To which Mr Penrith-Smith ...

Hobohemianism

Blake Morrison, 30 June 2011

The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp 
by W.H. Davies.
Amberley, 192 pp., £14.99, September 2010, 978 1 84868 980 0
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... Autobiography of a Super-Tramp. Bored, middle-aged, and dissatisfied with his posh friends, the anonymous narrator decides it’s time to marry and, after his first two proposals are turned down, resolves ‘to trouble no more about respectable women, but to find a wife in the common streets’. Emma, the pretty young woman he meets one night by a bus stop ...

Laertes has a daughter

Bee Wilson: The Redgraves, 6 June 2013

The Redgraves: A Family Epic 
by Donald Spoto.
Robson, 361 pp., £25, November 2012, 978 1 84954 394 1
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The House of Redgrave: The Lives of a Theatrical Dynasty 
by Tim Adler.
Aurum, 336 pp., £20, July 2012, 978 1 84513 623 9
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... Nip/Tuck, about Miami plastic surgeons. The role of her mother was played by Vanessa Redgrave. In Anonymous (2011), a conspiracy theory film based on the notion that Shakespeare was really the Earl of Oxford, Joely plays the young Elizabeth I and Vanessa plays the old version. Later this year, Joely’s 21-year-old daughter Daisy Bevan will appear in her ...

Diary

Jenny Diski: In Defence of Liz Jones, 12 September 2013

... agreed that a famous person revealing their own clinical despair could only be helpful to the anonymous millions struggling in silence with the stigma of mental illness. Fry was applauded in the columns, on TV and on the front pages, called courageous and thanked for speaking out and bringing great benefit to those suffering from misunderstood mood ...

Like a Mosquito

Mattathias Schwartz: Drones, 4 July 2013

Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield 
by Jeremy Scahill.
Serpent’s Tail, 642 pp., £15.99, May 2013, 978 1 84668 850 8
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... deliberately killed without trial by their own government did not arise again until 2010, when an anonymous US official told the Washington Post that Anwar al-Awlaki, a US-born Muslim cleric and online celebrity among Islamic radicals, was on a kill list. ‘He’s working actively to kill Americans,’ the official said, ‘so it’s both lawful and sensible ...

Via ‘Bret’ via Bret

J. Robert Lennon: Bret Easton Ellis, 24 June 2010

Imperial Bedrooms 
by Bret Easton Ellis.
Picador, 178 pp., £16.99, July 2010, 978 0 330 44976 2
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... dipped in acid; things fell off, skin was removed.’ And through it all, Clay keeps getting anonymous text messages from whoever is watching him. You could be forgiven for thinking that all this will eventually add up to something. Clay certainly thinks it should. A lot of the second half of this book consists of him trying to get people to tell him ...

Ink Blots, Pin Holes

Caroline Gonda: ‘Frankenstein’, 28 January 2010

The Original ‘Frankenstein’ 
by Mary Shelley, with Percy Shelley, edited by Charles Robinson.
Bodleian Library, 448 pp., £14.99, October 2009, 978 1 85124 396 9
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... Mary Shelley.’ Assumptions that Percy Shelley himself wrote Frankenstein began as early as its anonymous publication in 1818; perhaps misled by its dedication to Godwin and its unattributed inclusion of some lines from Percy Shelley’s poem ‘Mutability’, Walter Scott certainly believed him to be the author when he reviewed the novel for ...

Roth, Pinter, Berlin and Me

Christopher Tayler: Clive James, 11 March 2010

The Blaze of Obscurity: The TV Years 
by Clive James.
Picador, 325 pp., £17.99, October 2009, 978 0 330 45736 1
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... of being Hitler, and launches into a riff on the fact that few people accuse themselves of being anonymous small-time Nazis. His own idea of self-deprecation involves measuring himself against Hitler (twice), Napoleon (twice), Stalin, Dönitz, Speer, Leonardo, Turgenev, J.S. Mill, Shelley and – in his early appetite for experience – ‘a sperm whale ...

Thoughts about Boars and Paul Celan

Lawrence Norfolk: The Ways of the Boar, 6 January 2011

... of Agriculture on the state of pig-breeding in Staffordshire in 1796 includes an engraving of an anonymous painting of a pig belonging to Mr Dyott of Freeford Manor, Lichfield. The pig’s coat is dark, the snout long – characteristics of a wild animal – but he is very nearly spherical and is said to have weighed 800 lbs at two and a half years. The ...

Having Fun

Ben Jackson: Online Shaming, 9 April 2015

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed 
by Jon Ronson.
Picador, 277 pp., £16.99, March 2015, 978 0 330 49228 7
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... head.’ Threats like this are a criminal offence – and there’s a big difference between being anonymous online and being physically untraceable – but the police rarely take action in such cases. So even though the account was suspended and the tweets deleted (they passed the ‘direct, specific threat’ test), whoever was behind the account was free to ...

Free Schools

Dawn Foster, 7 May 2015

... head of department, were also charged. Concerns had been raised about the school’s finances by anonymous whistleblowers. An investigation was undertaken by the Education Funding Agency; in October 2013 its report was leaked to the media. It found that of the £182,933 grant paid to the school, only £19,872 could be corroborated by the school’s ...

Diary

Emily Witt: Online Dating, 25 October 2012

... with his credit card, and created an email-based dating service. Subscribers were given anonymous addresses from which to send out their profiles with a photo attached. The photos arrived as hard copy, and Kremen and his employees scanned them in by hand. Interested single people who did not yet have email could participate by fax. By 1994 modems ...

i could’ve sold to russia or china

Jeremy Harding: Bradley Manning, 19 July 2012

The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in US History 
by Chase Madar.
OR, 167 pp., £10, April 2012, 978 1 935928 53 9
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... and ‘global intelligence’ firm in Texas, which was obtained by the hacktivist collective Anonymous and released by WikiLeaks six months ago? Among the 5.5 million messages, several relate to Assange and one of them, from Fred Burton, the company’s ‘vice president for counter-terrorism and corporate security’, says simply: ‘Not for Pub – We ...

Behind the Gas Lamp

Julian Barnes: Félix Fénéon, 4 October 2007

Novels in Three Lines 
by Félix Fénéon, translated by Luc Sante.
NYRB, 171 pp., £7.99, August 2007, 978 1 59017 230 8
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... awareness of the Nouvelles en trois lignes by claiming, in a newspaper column – appropriately anonymous – that they had ‘invented’ the ‘words at liberty adopted by the Futurists’. Their clandestine reputation and significance has, over the century, become an idée reçue. Here it is, as related by Hilary Spurling in her biography of ...

Do come to me funeral

Mary Beard: Jessica Mitford, 5 July 2007

Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford 
edited by Peter Sussman.
Weidenfeld, 744 pp., £25, November 2006, 0 297 60745 6
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... on the wagon. Without any outside help (none of ‘that appalling Frank Talk etc’ at Alcoholics Anonymous), and with what must have been heroic strength of will, she quit. A few weeks into the process, she confessed to Deborah that it was now really only at 9.30 a.m. ‘when I do rather crave a drink’. There is, however, a stronger strand of poignancy ...

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