Picture in Little

Charles Nicholl: Hilliard’s Trajectory, 19 December 2019

Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist 
by Elizabeth Goldring.
Yale, 337 pp., £40, February 2019, 978 0 300 24142 6
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... their number has grown over the years, as earlier identifications have proved untenable. Now these anonymous sitters are distinguished only by some particularity of costume or composition – ‘Unknown Woman with a Thistle’ or ‘a Cherry’, ‘a Jewelled Hat’, ‘a Lace Cap’, ‘Standing in a Room’, ‘in Bed’ or simply ‘Unfinished’.These ...

A Rock of Order

Christopher Clark: Through Metternich’s Eyes, 8 October 2020

Metternich: Strategist and Visionary 
by Wolfram Siemann, translated by Daniel Steuer.
Harvard, 900 pp., £31.95, November 2019, 978 0 674 74392 2
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... taking cover wherever possible and converging for horde attacks on key enemy positions. In an anonymous pamphlet of 1794, Metternich described the consequences: ‘Old men and children, willing or unwilling, timid or brave, all fought in the same ranks. Peoples attacked armies and small forces had to resist enormous masses. Thousands fell on one side, and ...

Post-Useful Misfits

Thomas Jones: Mick Herron’s Spies, 19 October 2023

The Secret Hours 
by Mick Herron.
Baskerville, 393 pp., £22, September, 978 1 3998 0053 2
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... and they’ve been shunted off the fast track to run this dead-end inquiry in an anonymous building far from the centres of power. Throughout the Slough House novels there are repeated references to the difference between Moscow rules (‘Watch your back’) and London rules (‘Cover your arse’). London rules make an appearance in The ...

After the Coup

Francis Wade: Resistance in Myanmar, 30 November 2023

... state. In February, it sold a lease for a military-controlled gems mine in central Myanmar to an anonymous buyer for $4 million, on the understanding that the mining rights will only come into effect if the military is toppled. It has sold interest-free ‘Spring Revolution bonds’ and shares in military-owned real estate on a similar basis. The bonds have ...

Stop all the cocks!

James Lasdun: Who killed Jane Stanford?, 1 December 2022

Who Killed Jane Stanford? A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits and the Birth of a University 
by Richard White.
Norton, 362 pp., £25, August 2022, 978 1 324 00433 2
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... of paranoia and intrigue. Loyalists denounced the fired professors for various unspeakable crimes, anonymous statements circulated in their defence, conspirators huddled in dark corners, and observers from the AAUP, the academic professionals’ association, were escorted off the premises by security. I’d been too recently hired to stack up any plausible ...

In Time of Schism

Fraser MacDonald, 16 March 2023

... waged on Twitter and some of it on his blog, ‘The Wee Flea’, where in May 2014 he published an anonymous open letter to Lorna Hood, the incoming moderator of the Church of Scotland, who had complained that certain congregations were still debarring women from entering the pulpit. The author of that letter, revealed by the Daily Record as Kate ...

Among the Antimacassars

Alison Light, 11 November 1999

Flush 
by Virginia Woolf, edited by Elizabeth Steele.
Blackwell, 123 pp., £50, December 1998, 0 631 17729 9
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Timbuktu 
by Paul Auster.
Faber, 186 pp., £12.99, June 1999, 0 571 19197 5
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... past, before returning home to die. Flush is the history of a dog who makes it happily into an anonymous modernity. Its escapism let Woolf play with those relativising perceptions which elsewhere risked destabilising, even depleting the self as well as deconstructing the idea of a commonality – a risk-taking which impelled her to write. In the more ...

Anthropomorphic Carrot

Polly Dickson: Tales from Hoffmann, 23 January 2025

‘The Golden Pot’ and Other Tales of the Uncanny 
by E.T.A. Hoffmann, translated by Peter Wortsman.
Archipelago, 425 pp., £14.99, October 2023, 978 1 953861 70 2
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The Wounded Storyteller: The Traumatic Tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann 
by E.T.A. Hoffmann, translated by Jack Zipes.
Yale, 277 pp., £30, April 2023, 978 0 300 26319 0
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... Corner Window’, included in Wortsman’s collection, takes the form of a dialogue between the anonymous narrator and his cousin, an author now on his deathbed – as Hoffmann was when he wrote the story – who was famous for ‘pumping out all manner of charming narratives’ (this is a bit of a leap from the original ‘allerlei anmutige Geschichten ...

Half-Wrecked

Mary Beard: What’s left of John Soane, 17 February 2000

John Soane: An Accidental Romantic 
by Gillian Darley.
Yale, 358 pp., £25, September 1999, 0 300 08165 0
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John Soane, Architect: Master of Space and Light 
by Margaret Richardson and Mary-Anne Stevens.
Royal Academy, 302 pp., £45, September 1999, 0 300 08195 2
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Sir John Soane and the Country Estate 
by Ptolemy Dean.
Ashgate, 204 pp., £37.50, October 1999, 1 84014 293 6
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... his first work at the Bank, Soane’s idiosyncratic antique style had already been satirised in an anonymous poem entitled ‘The Modern Goth’ (‘To see pilasters scored like loins of pork,/To see the Order in confusion move,/Scroles fixed below and Pedestals above,/To see defiance hurled at Greece and Rome’ etc, etc). When Soane heard that this had been ...

Henry and Hamlet

Barbara Everett, 22 February 2024

... clear and coherent with its all-verse unity, compared to the sense of confusion and formless, anonymous bustle that many have found in Henry VI Part I. Henry has nothing like the superb theatrical rhetoric, in both word and action, that accompanies Richard. There was for Shakespeare, as there still is now, little to say about Henry. Not without decency ...

Solve, Struggle, Invent

Rachel Nolan: Cuba Speaks, 6 June 2024

How Things Fall Apart: What Happened to the Cuban Revolution 
by Elizabeth Dore.
Apollo, 341 pp., £10.99, August 2023, 978 1 80328 381 4
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The Tribe: Portraits of Cuba 
by Carlos Manuel Álvarez, translated by Frank Wynne and Rahul Bery.
Fitzcarraldo, 336 pp., £12.99, May 2022, 978 1 913097 91 2
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... officials who might help. ‘Your project is beautiful,’ one deputy minister who asked to remain anonymous told her. ‘I’d like to help. But remember Oscar Lewis. In Cuba, oral history is taboo.’Lewis and his team spent eighteen months interviewing Cubans, but in 1970 the Communist Party shut down the project. Raúl Castro accused him of working for the ...

Rolex and Ladurée

Em Hogan: Constance Debré’s Bravado, 17 April 2025

Playboy 
by Constance Debré, translated by Holly James.
Tuskar Rock, 172 pp., £10.99, May 2024, 978 1 80081 984 9
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Love Me Tender 
by Constance Debré, translated by Holly James.
Tuskar Rock, 165 pp., £10.99, November 2023, 978 1 80081 484 4
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Name 
by Constance Debré, translated by Lauren Elkin.
Tuskar Rock, 144 pp., £10.99, April, 978 1 80081 987 0
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... PlayStation, giving myself brain damage.’ She moves into the spare room of a friend of a friend. Anonymous women return: those who have attended her readings (like Debré, she has become an infamous author), those she picks up at cafés, a female police officer she eyes up. She sleeps with a ‘real butch, for a change’. The catalogue continues: ‘I go ...

Travelling Text

Marina Warner, 18 December 2008

The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights 
translated by Malcolm Lyons, with Ursula Lyons.
Penguin, 2715 pp., £125, November 2008, 978 0 14 091166 4
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‘The Arabian Nights’ in Historical Context: Between East and West 
edited by Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum.
Oxford, 337 pp., £55, November 2008, 978 0 19 955415 7
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... the work wasn’t taken seriously was that it eluded concepts of authorship: the stories were anonymous and composed at different periods in different places. The architecture of the frame story – Scheherazade telling stories to the sultan every night till dawn to save her life – insisted on the oral, collective, immemorial character of the ...

Just Two Clicks

Jonathan Raban: The Virtual Life of Neil Entwistle, 14 August 2008

... Entwistle spent most of his time. The global theatre of the internet, on whose enormous stage anonymous actors experiment with personae, using whimsical screen-names and avatars that can be changed from moment to moment, is a haven for the insecure. Shy teenage girls turn into bold sirens on their MySpace and Facebook pages, and it’s a safe bet that ...

Jam Tomorrow

F.M.L. Thompson, 31 August 1989

Clichés of Urban Doom, and Other Essays 
by Ruth Glass.
Blackwell, 266 pp., £25, November 1988, 0 631 12806 9
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Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the 20th Century 
by Peter Hall.
Blackwell, 473 pp., £25, November 1988, 0 631 13444 1
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London 2001 
by Peter Hall.
Unwin Hyman, 226 pp., £17.95, January 1989, 9780044451617
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The Big Smoke: A History of Air Pollution in London since Medieval Times 
by Peter Brimblecombe.
Routledge, 185 pp., £12.95, March 1989, 0 415 03001 3
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New York Unbound: The City and the Politics of the Future 
edited by Peter Salins.
Blackwell, 223 pp., £35, December 1988, 1 55786 008 4
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The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Forms in Rome, Italy and the Ancient World 
by Joseph Rykwert.
MIT, 241 pp., $15, September 1988, 0 262 68056 4
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... are Ebenezer Howard, Raymond Unwin and Patrick Abercrombie. The baddies, apart from hosts of anonymous speculative builders and town hall bureaucrats, are exemplified by Lutyens and Corbusier: Lutyens because his cult of the monumental turned the official city (New Delhi) into a huge façade behind which the rest was left to its own devices, and ...