Was he? Had he?

Corey Robin: In the Name of Security, 19 October 2006

The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government 
by David Johnson.
Chicago, 277 pp., £13, May 2006, 0 226 40190 1
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Terrorism and the Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties in the Name of National Security 
by David Cole and James Dempsey.
New Press, 320 pp., £10.99, March 2006, 1 56584 939 6
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General Ashcroft: Attorney at War 
by Nancy Baker.
Kansas, 320 pp., £26.50, April 2006, 0 7006 1455 9
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State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration 
by James Risen.
Free Press, 240 pp., £18.99, January 2006, 0 7432 7578 0
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Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush 
by Eric Boehlert.
Free Press, 352 pp., $25, May 2006, 0 7432 8931 5
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... and offered women plentiful opportunities to support themselves by government jobs. What with the anonymous cruising sites of Lafayette Park (right in front of the White House) and the company of tolerant female colleagues in the federal bureaucracy, homosexuals managed to turn Washington into a ‘very gay city’. Hoover grew up in DC when it was a racist ...

O brambles, chain me too

Tom Paulin: Life and Vowels of Andrew Marvell, 25 November 1999

World Enough and Time: The Life of Andrew Marvell 
by Nicholas Murray.
Little, Brown, 294 pp., £20, September 1999, 0 316 64863 9
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Marvell and Liberty 
edited by Warren Chernaik and Martin Dzelzainis.
Macmillan, 365 pp., £47.50, July 1999, 0 333 72585 9
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Andrew Marvell 
edited by Thomas Healy.
Longman, 212 pp., £12.99, September 1998, 0 582 21910 8
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... this editor says, that he was forced to have his letters directed to him under another name. An anonymous poet called him ‘this Islands watchful Centinel’, and his vigilant patriotic shade can be glimpsed behind these lines of Larkin’s celebrating Hull, that remote city beloved of many poets, which stands like a lonely beacon on the North ...

Doomed to Sincerity

Germaine Greer: Rochester as New Man, 16 September 1999

The Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester 
edited by Harold Love.
Oxford, 712 pp., £95, April 1999, 0 19 818367 4
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... R——, in which, of 61 poems, only about half are likely to have been written by Rochester. The anonymous publishers were as aware of their own dishonesty as Burnet must have been, because different attributions for some of the poems they published as by Rochester can be found in their copy-text, a manuscript now in the Beinecke Library at Yale. As ...

She shall be nameless

Nicholas Spice: Marlen Haushofer, 18 December 2014

The Wall 
by Marlen Haushofer, translated by Shaun Whiteside.
Quartet, 211 pp., £12, June 2013, 978 0 7043 7311 2
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Nowhere Ending Sky 
by Marlen Haushofer, translated by Amanda Prantera.
Quartet, 178 pp., £12, June 2013, 978 0 7043 7207 8
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The Loft 
by Marlen Haushofer, translated by Amanda Prantera.
Quartet, 173 pp., £12, May 2011, 978 0 7043 7313 6
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... Sunday. On each day between Monday and Saturday, the woman receives in the post a package from an anonymous sender – each package an instalment of her diary from 17 years earlier. She is unsettled by the diary’s sudden appearance; she had believed it lost. Each day she goes up to her private space in the loft to read the new instalment, then takes it down ...

No Theatricks

Ferdinand Mount: Burke, 21 August 2014

The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: from the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence 
by David Bromwich.
Harvard, 500 pp., £25, May 2014, 978 0 674 72970 4
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Moral Imagination: Essays 
by David Bromwich.
Princeton, 350 pp., £19.95, March 2014, 978 0 691 16141 9
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... As J.W. Burrow puts it, ‘the common law is not a creation of heroic judges but the slow, anonymous sedimentation of immemorial custom; the constitution is no gift but the continuous self-defining public activity of the nation.’ Burke is a sedimentalist, just as he is, in a non-pejorative sense, a sentimentalist. The sentiments of the ...

On Cruelty

Judith Butler: The Death Penalty, 17 July 2014

The Death Penalty: Vol. I 
by Jacques Derrida, translated by Peggy Kamuf.
Chicago, 328 pp., £24.50, January 2014, 978 0 226 14432 0
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... on our wish to continue torturing that other, even when it isn’t someone in particular, but an anonymous other or the general population? To answer that question, we have also to ask whether there are social relations outside the terms of debt and payment, relations that might be understood as being outside capital, or outside the psychic and moral terms ...

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 ...

Double Tongued

Blair Worden: Worshipping Marvell, 18 November 2010

Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon 
by Nigel Smith.
Yale, 400 pp., £25, September 2010, 978 0 300 11221 4
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... Then there are the problems of literary attribution. Most of his poems were, like his prose works, anonymous. It is hardest of all to identify his contributions to the collaborative campaigns of underground satirical verse that were aimed at the Restoration court. Even when we can say what he wrote and when he wrote it, his character masks or contradicts ...

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 ...

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 Person in the Phone Booth

David Trotter: Phone Booths, 28 January 2010

... left behind by a previous user. Expecting to speak and to listen, they instead inhale the anonymous yet fiercely intimate odour of the crowd. The protagonist of Howard Simpson’s Vietnam spy novel, Someone Else’s War (2003), has information to gather. He makes a call. ‘The phone booth smelled of urine; someone had spat generously on the floor and ...

Wanting to Be Something Else

Adam Shatz: Orhan Pamuk, 7 January 2010

The Museum of Innocence 
by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Maureen Freely.
Faber, 720 pp., £18.99, December 2009, 978 0 571 23700 5
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... narrator, sometimes under cheeky pseudonyms such as ‘Orphan Panic’, and occasionally as the anonymous writer of Pamukian novels.) And Füsun bears a resemblance to other significant women in Pamuk, such as the girl he describes in the memoir Istanbul, who sat for him when he was an aspiring painter (‘my sad and beautiful model’, ‘my almond-scented ...

The Getaway Car

Glen Newey: Machiavelli, 21 January 2016

Machiavellian Democracy 
by John McCormick.
Cambridge, 252 pp., £21.99, March 2011, 978 0 521 53090 3
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Machiavelli in the Making 
by Claude Lefort, translated by Michael Smith.
Northwestern, 512 pp., £32.50, January 2012, 978 0 8101 2438 7
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Redeeming ‘The Prince’: The Meaning of Machiavelli’s Masterpiece 
by Maurizio Viroli.
Princeton, 189 pp., £18.95, October 2013, 978 0 691 16001 6
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... design than on the need for broad-based political participation beyond the act of voting. An anonymous author, writing in Philadelphia in 1776, identified Machiavelli as the inventor of judicial review and, by extension, of the jurisprudential originalism of present-day judges such as Antonin Scalia. The author cites Lord Camden, who wished ‘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 ...

A Peacock Called Mirabell

August Kleinzahler: James Merrill, 31 March 2016

James Merrill: Life and Art 
by Langdon Hammer.
Knopf, 913 pp., £27, April 2015, 978 0 375 41333 9
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... has been, typically, personal and anecdotal, but the narrator was most comfortable as an almost anonymous observer … least comfortable at the centre of the poem where … the treatment becomes positively rhetorical. The rhetoric amounts to a kind of withholding, but I am not sure of what.’ The verse of the Ouija board poems is freer; the use of the ...