Bizarre and Wonderful

Wes Enzinna: Murray Bookchin, Eco-Anarchist, 4 May 2017

Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin 
by Janet Biehl.
Oxford, 344 pp., £22.99, October 2015, 978 0 19 934248 8
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... into practice as the first society that establishes a tangible democratic confederalism,’ an anonymous member of the PKK leadership said after Bookchin died in July 2006. ‘We undertake to make him live in our struggle.’ In Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin, Janet Biehl portrays Öcalan’s idol as a contradictory source of ...

Vorsprung durch Techno

Ian Penman, 10 September 2020

Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany 
by Uwe Schütte.
Penguin, 316 pp., £9.99, February, 978 0 14 198675 3
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... Florian. It’s surprising they didn’t think to use ‘Vorsprung durch technik’ as a slogan before Audi did: ‘Advancement through Technology’ is Kraftwerk to a T.We never quite get a sense, from Uwe Schütte’s account of this cusp moment in Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany, of how or why Hütter and Schneider took their new pan-European direction ...

Slashed, Red and Dead

Michael Hofmann: Rilke, To Me, 21 January 2021

... grey: a ship is being loaded up), then an attitude. We think – we are told to think – of the anonymous column of émigrés, the caravan of departing souls: where is the heroism in that, where is the resistance? These Greeks are just giving up in front of the Persians, kowtowing. Then we notice, rather oddly, that there are no people in the poem. We are ...

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 ...

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 ...
... 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 ...

Diary

Andrew Brighton: On Peter Fuller, 7 November 1991

... Modernism, Fuller pounced on anything that smacked of mental sloth or moral vacuity,’ opined the anonymous author of the Telegraph obituary. Roger Scruton in his memorial service valedictory saw Fuller’s intellectual life as growth towards a maturity into which he had just entered, a movement towards the familiar shape of right thinking. This was not the ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Wall Furniture

Nicholas Penny: Dickens and Anti-Art, 24 May 2012

... a major feature of Household Words, but on 13 September 1856 the leading contribution was an anonymous article written by Dickens’s friend Wilkie Collins and entitled ‘To think, or be thought for’. The pretext for the piece was a controversy in the correspondence columns of the Times concerning a picture by ‘the old Venetian painter ...

Our Lady of the Counterculture

Marina Warner: The Virgin Mary, 8 November 2012

... wanderings and migrations were themes of the show and lie at the heart of its quest to bring the anonymous – the ordinary – into view as the makers of the world. It’s a long time ago that I lost my faith in Mary, a long time since she was the fulcrum of the scheme of salvation I then believed in, alongside Jesus the chief redeemer. But I find that the ...

The Other Thomas

Charles Nicholl, 8 November 2012

... is a reference to Minnagara, which is described in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (an anonymous route-book of the first century AD) as a ‘metropolis … subject to Parthian princes’ lying close to the middle of the seven mouths of the Indus. It has been proposed that the other Indian king named in the Acts, Mazdai or Misdeos, is also an actual ...

They rudely stare about

Tobias Gregory: Thomas Browne, 4 July 2013

‘Religio Medici’ and ‘Urne-Buriall’ 
by Thomas Browne, edited by Stephen Greenblatt and Ramie Targoff.
NYRB, 170 pp., £7.99, September 2012, 978 1 59017 488 3
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... terms must be given their proper weight. We are animals, and yet we are noble; though we reduce to anonymous ashes, we are splendid. ‘Man’ is used inclusively, with no distinction between Christians and others, or between good Christians and bad ones. Browne dedicated Urne-Buriall to a friend whose father, a patient of Browne’s, had recently died. It may ...