Fighting Monks

Diarmaid MacCulloch: Baltic Snake Cults, 21 May 2026

Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe’s Last Pagan Peoples 
by Francis Young.
Cambridge, 432 pp., £25, June 2025, 978 1 009 58657 3
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The Black Cross: A History of the Baltic Crusades 
by Aleksander Pluskowski.
Yale, 447 pp., £25, January, 978 0 300 27906 1
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... the patronage of King Alfred of Wessex in the ninth century termed ‘Christendom’. This now anonymous scholar had translated a four-century-old world history written in Latin by the Roman Christian writer Orosius. His audience of Anglo-Saxons were determined to unite themselves to the newly named society. The Catholic Church had gained official imperial ...

A Piece of White Silk

Jacqueline Rose: Honour Killing, 5 November 2009

Murder in the Name of Honour 
by Rana Husseini.
Oneworld, 250 pp., £12.99, May 2009, 978 1 85168 524 0
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In Honour of Fadime: Murder and Shame 
by Unni Wikan, translated by Anna Paterson.
Chicago, 305 pp., £12.50, June 2008, 978 0 226 89686 1
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Honour Killing: Stories of Men Who Killed 
by Ayse Onal.
Saqi, 256 pp., £12.99, May 2008, 978 0 86356 617 2
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... that he had – to kill her. It is significant that this story begins when Abdullah receives an anonymous letter at his place of work accusing his daughter of behaving like a prostitute. The slur against a daughter’s, mother’s, sister’s honour most frequently begins with rumour and gossip, words that home in unfailingly on their target, but which also ...

Stalker & Co

Damian Grant, 20 November 1986

... During the next few days Sarah was followed by different police vehicles, and began to receive anonymous telephone calls. On 11 May she was stopped and questioned; on 13 May her flat in Hulme was burgled whilst she slept, and two witness statements material to her complaint against the Police were stolen. Two young people with criminal records were later ...

Hopi Mean Time

Iain Sinclair: Jim Sallis, 18 March 1999

Eye of the Cricket 
by James Sallis.
No Exit, 190 pp., £6.99, April 1998, 1 874061 77 7
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... is unpretentious and functional. A better class of scene-of-the-crime Polaroid, no mess. An anonymous set which can be abandoned or reconstituted as soon as the next move becomes necessary or desirable. Sallis’s office is forensic: images and files related to the various works in progress, and an answering-machine that stays on. Sallis, very ...

Placing Leavis

Geoffrey Hartman, 24 January 1985

The Leavises: Recollections and Impressions 
edited by Denys Thompson.
Cambridge, 207 pp., £15, October 1984, 0 521 25494 9
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The Social Mission of English Criticism: 1848-1932 
by Chris Baldick.
Oxford, 264 pp., £19.50, August 1983, 0 19 812821 5
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Radical Earnestness: English Social Theory 1880-1980 
by Fred Inglis.
Robertson, 253 pp., £16.50, November 1982, 0 85520 328 5
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The Critic as Anti-Philosopher: Essays and Papers by F.R. Leavis 
edited by G. Singh.
Chatto, 208 pp., £9.95, November 1982, 0 7011 2644 2
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... critic. It compares English with French responses to Marxist thought. English empiricism, the anonymous writer claims, ‘by destroying potentially useful ideas before they could be applied to new situations, has left an uncomfortable legacy. The bias of empiricism was largely responsible for preventing a whole generation of English philosophers from ...

The Prophet’s Hair

Salman Rushdie, 16 April 1981

... his solitary excursion, and beaten within an inch of his life. Night fell. His body was carried by anonymous hands to the edge of the lake, whence it was transported by shikara across the water and deposited, torn and bleeding, on the deserted embankment of the canal which led to the gardens of Shalimar. At dawn the next morning a flower-vendor was rowing his ...

Terrorism

Ian Gilmour, 23 October 1986

Britain’s Civil Wars: Counter-Insurgency in the 20th Century 
by Charles Townshend.
Faber, 220 pp., £14.95, June 1986, 0 571 13802 0
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Terrorism and the Liberal State 
by Paul Wilkinson.
Macmillan, 322 pp., £25, May 1986, 0 333 39490 9
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Terrorism: How the West can win 
edited by Benjamin Netanyahu.
Weidenfeld, 254 pp., £14.95, August 1986, 0 297 79025 0
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Political Murder: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism 
by Franklin Ford.
Harvard, 440 pp., £24.95, November 1985, 0 674 68635 7
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The Financing of Terror 
by James Adams.
New English Library, 294 pp., £12.95, July 1986, 0 450 06086 1
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They dare to speak out: People and institutions confront Israel’s lobby 
by Paul Findley.
Lawrence Hill (Connecticut), 362 pp., $16.95, May 1985, 0 88208 179 9
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... to superiors at the workplace, mention in published “enemies lists”, ostracism, hate mail, anonymous phone calls, threats to one’s personal safety, and, in a few cases, physical attack’. The intimidation of American politicians and the press is a direct cause of violence and terrorism in the Middle East. As a result of it, American policy is almost ...

In Praise of Vagueness

Richard Poirier, 14 December 1995

Henry James and the Art of Non-Fiction 
by Tony Tanner.
Georgia, 92 pp., £20.50, May 1995, 9780820316895
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... he describes as repressive, even murderous, our habitual ways of using words. ‘All dumb or anonymous psychic states have, owing to this error, been coolly suppressed; or, if recognised at all, have been named after the substantive perception they led up to, as thoughts “about” this object or “about” that, the stolid word about engulfing all ...

The Numinous Moose

Helen Vendler, 11 March 1993

Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It 
by Brett Millier.
California, 602 pp., £18.50, April 1993, 0 520 07978 7
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... thoughts against thoughts in groans grind. For too long, Bishop had lived these moral choices of life/death, right/wrong, male/female: but at last, the early happy years with Lota had made them seem irrelevant, and Bishop, longing for Paradise since her blighted childhood, felt she had found it at Santarém: That golden evening I really wanted to go no farther; more than anything else I wanted to stay awhile in that conflux of two great rivers ...

Diary

Bernadette Wren: Epistemic Injustice, 2 December 2021

... without and within, and in August 2018 a damning internal report, based on conversations with an anonymous group of anxious, unhappy and overwhelmed GIDS staff, was sent to the board of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust. The author used the language of ‘whistle-blowing’: GIDS appeared suspect and unaccountable, although it had always operated in plain ...

Yuh wanna play bad?

Christopher Tayler: Henry Roth, 23 March 2006

Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth 
by Steven Kellman.
Norton, 372 pp., $16.99, September 2005, 0 393 05779 8
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Call It Sleep 
by Henry Roth.
Picador US, 462 pp., $15, July 2005, 0 312 42412 4
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... Greenwich Village intellectuals of the 1930s the two views were held to be incompatible. An anonymous writer in the New Masses jeered at ‘the sex phobia of this six-year-old Proust’ and wondered why ‘so many young writers drawn from the proletariat can make no better use of their working-class experience than as material for introspective and ...

Indigo, Cyanine, Beryl

Helen Vendler: Jorie Graham’s Daring, 23 January 2003

Never 
by Jorie Graham.
Carcanet, 112 pp., £9.95, September 2002, 1 85754 621 0
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... closing poem, ‘High Tide’, a frightening meditation on the attempt at an ethical response to anonymous human misery. We begin in medias res as the poet sees a deranged homeless woman on the street: She held a sign that said Emergency [nothing else]. Handwritten in pencil on the corrugated strip of boxtop. Emergency (‘[all caps]’) is, so to ...

Illuminating, horrible etc

Jenny Turner: David Foster Wallace, 14 April 2011

Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace 
by David Lipsky.
Broadway, 320 pp., $16.99, 9780307592439
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The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel 
by David Foster Wallace.
Hamish Hamilton, 547 pp., £20, April 2011, 978 0 241 14480 0
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... himself, by the time we meet him, into a man heroically determined, with the support of Alcoholics Anonymous, to lead a useful and loving life. If such a convergence sounds familiar – one younger man, one older; one street level, one upscale – the Ulysses echo is intentional, with a tension explicitly set up early on as to when, if ever, Hal and Gately ...

Don’t Look Down

Nicholas Spice: Dull Britannia, 8 April 2010

Family Britain 1951-57 
by David Kynaston.
Bloomsbury, 776 pp., £25, November 2009, 978 0 7475 8385 1
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... the views of the ordinary citizen speak through trends and averages; in the utterances of the anonymous subjects of sociological surveys, such as the reports of Mass Observation; and in the musings of a clutch of otherwise obscure individuals who just happened to keep diaries throughout the period. He deploys these resources deftly, especially in ...

Everybody’s Joan

Marina Warner, 6 December 2012

... the names of women in history who have been treated badly. He observed no hierarchy: sibyls, anonymous prisoners, celebrated writers each take their place, side by side, and Joan is one of them: She has been lobotomised with Naomi Ginsberg but she does not forget. She has been stoned in Khomeini’s brickyard but she does not forget. She has hung in a ...