May he roar with pain!

John Sturrock, 27 May 1993

Flaubert–Sand: The Correspondence 
translated by Barbara Bray.
HarperCollins, 428 pp., £20, March 1993, 0 00 217625 4
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Correspondence. Tome III: janvier 1859 – décembre 1868 
by Gustave Flaubert, edited by Jean Bruneau.
Gallimard, 1727 pp., frs 20, March 1991, 2 07 010669 1
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Madame Bovary: Patterns of Provincial Life 
by Gustave Flaubert, translated by Francis Steegmuller.
Everyman, 330 pp., £8.99, March 1993, 1 85715 140 2
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Madame Bovary 
by Gustave Flaubert, translated by Geoffrey Wall.
Penguin, 292 pp., £4.99, June 1992, 0 14 044526 9
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... I assure you it will amuse you. It’s much better, because I’m in the foreground’), and of an anonymous letter to him years later accusing him of, among other failings, having sucked up to the emperor, Napoleon III. As an addressee the turbulent Colet is a real loss, because Flaubert’s letters to her are the most vigorously and drolly intimate he ever ...

When that great day comes

R.W. Johnson, 22 July 1993

... active in the NAI are already so frightened of DAC that they will only speak to the press on an anonymous basis. The Congress of SA Writers (COSAW), of which Nadine Gordimer is again the doyenne, shows ominous signs of de facto ANC-alignment. Local enthusiasts who want to start a literary journal, for example, complain of difficulties with COSAW because the ...

Let’s not overthink this

Michael Wood, 9 September 1993

... supposed to have done – lifeguard, lumberjack, gas station attendant. He got a few bit parts: an anonymous Saxon in Lady Godiva of Coventry, a baffled lab technician in Revenge of the Creature. One or two of the characters he played actually had names, but it was small-time stuff, and Eastwood said of Ambush at Cimarron Pass that it was ‘even worse than ...
... that illustrate the variety of views, rather than intrude personal judgment on the evidence? Such anonymous editorial statements appear misleadingly imbued with lexicographical authority, even though this is not borne out by the cited quotations. So much for the Supplement portion of OED2 considered on its own terms. How happily does it mesh with the original ...

Vertiginous

Nicholas Penny, 12 December 1996

Grands Décors français 1650-1800 
by Bruno Pons.
Faton, 439 pp., £130, June 1995, 2 87844 023 4
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The Rococo Interior 
by Katie Scott.
Yale, 342 pp., £39.95, November 1995, 0 300 04582 4
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Chardin 
by Marianne Roland Michel, translated by Eithne McCarthy.
Thames and Hudson, 293 pp., £60, March 1996, 0 500 09259 1
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... food and humble utensils and indeed plain (although never poor) people, including servants. One anonymous critic, quoted by Michel, observed that ‘there is no woman of the third estate’ who would not acknowledge the truth of Chardin’s paintings. But this is just what was said of the ordinary folk in comedies that were nevertheless chiefly written for ...
... were perhaps the most prestigious literary essays being published at the time and yet they were anonymous. FW: No. I’m not for anonymity, but I didn’t mind myself. Having given up the stories, I slid happily into this other thing of being a literary journalist. Then in 1953 I made a resolution that I must get a job that year. So I did get a job, with a ...

Biscuits. Oh good!

Anna Vaux: Antonia White, 27 May 1999

Antonia White 
by Jane Dunn.
Cape, 484 pp., £20, November 1998, 9780224036191
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... aspect – e.g. sex appeal – of one of the people present, and someone then reads out the anonymous comments). Poor Emily Coleman was found going through the wastepaper basket one night after everyone had gone to bed, trying to work out who had written what about her. White – who cared greatly about her blonde, pink and sometimes overweight ...

Off the record

John Bayley, 19 September 1985

Life and Fate 
by Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert Chandler.
Collins, 880 pp., £15, September 1985, 0 00 261454 5
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... arbitrary fates – who was killed where, who starved, drowned, was shot, gassed, or relapsed into anonymous existence. We follow to Auschwitz Sophia Levinton, a Jewish doctor, a major in the Medical Corps, captured at Stalingrad, because she happens to be a friend of Yevgenia Shaposhnikova. The latter’s brother-in-law Viktor, an atomic physicist, the most ...

Dummy and Biffy

Noël Annan, 17 October 1985

Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community 
by Christopher Andrew.
Heinemann, 616 pp., £12.95, October 1985, 0 434 02110 5
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The Secret Generation 
by John Gardner.
Heinemann, 453 pp., £9.95, August 1985, 0 434 28250 2
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Two Thyrds 
by Bertie Denham.
Ross Anderson Publications, 292 pp., £7.95, September 1983, 0 86360 006 9
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The Ultimate Enemy: British Intelligence and Nazi Germany 1933-1939 
by Wesley Wark.
Tauris, 304 pp., £19.50, October 1985, 1 85043 014 4
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... organising a network. The spy-master has been degraded by Graham Greene into a shabby down-at-heel anonymous creature who will identify an innocent colleague with the mole he is hunting and kill the wrong man. For him Philby and Co are the modern equivalents of heroic Jesuit priests plotting against Elizabeth. In Le Carré’s world the dingy agents of the KGB ...

Rising Moon

R.W. Johnson, 18 December 1986

L’Empire Moon 
by Jean-Francois Boyer.
La Découverte, 419 pp., August 1986, 2 7071 1604 1
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The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection 
by Edward Herman and Frank Brodhead.
Sheridan Square, 255 pp., $19.95, May 1986, 0 940380 07 2
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... Sterling has long been known for her somewhat wild right-wing views and her heavy reliance on anonymous ‘intelligence sources’. Henze was a long-time CIA station chief in Turkey with a history of good connections with the Turkish Far Right. Ledeen, the ‘Italy expert’ in Reagan’s 1980-81 transition team, has a history of association with both the ...

Lowellship

John Bayley, 17 September 1987

Robert Lowell: Essays on the Poetry 
edited by Steven Gould Axelrod and Helen Deese.
Cambridge, 377 pp., £17.50, June 1987, 0 571 14979 0
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Collected Prose 
by Robert Lowell, edited and introduced by Robert Giroux.
Faber, 269 pp., £27.50, February 1987, 0 521 30872 0
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... who, like John Ashbery, are without this kind of substance, living syntactically among shadows, anonymous and generalised feelings and beings, subway sensations. Such a poetry is as original as Lowell’s and expresses the common lot as effectively as his can, though from a different premise and by a different method. Lowell, like Larkin, is unique and his ...

Tricked Out as a Virgin

Bee Wilson: Respectable Enough, 4 November 2021

The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey: A True Story of Sex, Crime and the Meaning of Justice 
by Julia Laite.
Profile, 410 pp., £16.99, April, 978 1 78816 442 9
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... only mattered when the victims were white women, and white women of the right kind. The anonymous author of The White Slave Traffic (1916) wrote that the trade ‘consists of the trapping of young women, who, once “broken in”, are condemned to a perpetual servitude, beside which the sufferings endured by the African slaves, prior to their ...

The Unpronounceable

Adam Mars-Jones: Garth Greenwell, 21 April 2016

What Belongs to You 
by Garth Greenwell.
Picador, 194 pp., £12.99, April 2016, 978 1 4472 8051 4
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... as ‘G.’, a maddening mannerism, while the older doesn’t even earn an initial letter. If this anonymous sister makes no contribution to the narrative, why include her at all? When the first section of the book was published as a novella, the note about its author didn’t shy away from suggesting a basis in autobiography: ‘Garth Greenwell lives in ...

White Power

Thomas Meaney, 1 August 2019

Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America 
by Kathleen Belew.
Harvard, 330 pp., £23.95, April 2018, 978 0 674 28607 8
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Revolutionaries for the Right Anti-Communist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War 
by Kyle Burke.
North Carolina, 337 pp., June 2018, 978 1 4696 4073 0
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... chance of their informing on one another. The move away from bands of local vigilante groups to anonymous, spread-out terror cells marked a major shift in the white power movement – reflecting an understanding that it was no longer operating merely in local contexts. Beam himself, Belew stresses, was an early and ardent adopter of the internet, making use ...

Gorilla with Mobile Phone

Theo Tait: Michel Houellebecq, 9 February 2006

Houellebecq non autorisé: enquête sur un phénomène 
by Denis Demonpion.
Maren Sell, 377 pp., €20, August 2005, 2 35004 022 4
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The Possibility of an Island 
by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Gavin Bowd.
Weidenfeld, 345 pp., £12.99, November 2005, 0 297 85098 9
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... except that it was depicted (like many locations in Houllebecq’s novels) as a torrid den of anonymous sex. Yves Donnars was keen that his business should avoid an unearned reputation for sexualité de groupe, so he took Houellebecq to court. The author reluctantly changed the name in later editions. Fiction often seems like a form of revenge on the ...