Book of Bad Ends

Paul Keegan: French Short Stories, 7 September 2023

The Penguin Book of French Short Stories: Vol I 
edited by Patrick McGuinness.
Penguin Classics, 483 pp., £30, October 2022, 978 0 241 46199 0
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The Penguin Book of French Short Stories: Vol II 
edited by Patrick McGuinness.
Penguin Classics, 352 pp., £30, October 2022, 978 0 241 46205 8
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... tale, ‘The Mysterious Correspondent’, in which the married protagonist, Françoise, receives anonymous letters that turn out to be from her constant companion, Christiane, who is wasting away from unrequited love. Françoise discovers the truth. But should she reciprocate, to save her friend’s life? The doctor advises yes, the confessor says no, her ...

A Man of Parts and Learning

Fara Dabhoiwala: Francis Williams Gets His Due, 21 November 2024

... mention Williams, but at the end of the extract, the Gentleman’s Magazine added a brief, anonymous comment that did. It was written by someone who’d known Williams when he had lived in London as a young man, and it highlighted his intellectual talents. It mentioned that Williams had been friends with several ‘men of science’; that he’d ...

Stuck on the Flypaper

Frances Stonor Saunders: The Hobsbawm File, 9 April 2015

... KPD had been exfiltrating its records to private addresses. Its top officials were working out of anonymous premises scattered round the city, and secret post offices had been installed in a piano store and a coal business. But Hermann Göring, minister of the interior, was on to them – ‘My mission is only to destroy and exterminate, nothing ...

A Pound Here, a Pound There

David Runciman, 21 August 2014

... changed. First, they advertise their presence, glaringly. When a new one pops up on an otherwise anonymous shopping street, you will notice. It will be bright and colourful, and instead of beaded curtains there are often big glass windows revealing the flashing lights and winking screens within. Second, some of those flashing lights come from large and ...

The Lives of Ronald Pinn

Andrew O’Hagan, 8 January 2015

... God, or Apple, or Freud. To them, life is a drama in which power rubs out one’s name; they are anonymous, ghosts in the machine, infiltrating and weakening the structures of the state and partying as they do so, causing havoc, encrypting who they are. When the FBI attacks Silk Road and attempts to shut it down, as it did most recently two months ago, on 5 ...

The Best Stuff

Ian Jack: David Astor, 2 June 2016

David Astor: A Life in Print 
by Jeremy Lewis.
Cape, 400 pp., £25, March 2016, 978 0 224 09090 2
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... might describe as ‘poetic’, but that was much less likely on a newspaper that had made the anonymous Insight team one of its star attractions. Around 7 or 8 p.m. every Saturday night, after our first edition had gone to press, messengers would deliver the first editions of our Sunday rivals to the news editor’s desk, where the night staff would go ...

Trains in Space

James Meek: The Great Train Robbery, 5 May 2016

The Railways: Nation, Network and People 
by Simon Bradley.
Profile, 645 pp., £25, September 2015, 978 1 84668 209 4
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... of the vanished Railway Clearing House, Bradley writes: The lost routines of the thousands of anonymous clerks at Eversholt Street – the endless, patient exactions of mental arithmetic in fractions and non-decimal units, even the neat copperplate writing – seem almost beyond the powers of the modern desk-worker. The same goes for the endurance and ...

What more could we want of ourselves!

Jacqueline Rose: On Rosa Luxemburg, 16 June 2011

The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg 
edited by Georg Adler, Peter Hudis and Annelies Laschitza, translated by George Shriver.
Verso, 609 pp., £25, February 2011, 978 1 84467 453 4
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... limp (after a misdiagnosed childhood illness). She never talked about it, except possibly in her anonymous antiwar ‘Junius Pamphlet’, smuggled out of prison in 1915, where, in attacking the war for reducing the labouring population to the ‘aged, the women, the maimed’ she may be invoking an older image of herself. She never belonged. ‘A severe ...

The Question of U

Ian Penman: Prince, 20 June 2019

Prince: Life and Times 
by Jason Draper.
Chartwell, 216 pp., £15.99, February 2017, 978 0 7858 3497 7
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The Most Beautiful: My Life with Prince 
by Mayte Garcia.
Trapeze, 304 pp., £9.99, April 2018, 978 1 4091 7121 8
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... production can’t disguise. Diamonds and Pearls is Prince-lite, assembled by a new cast of anonymous musicians, perfectly adequate professionals who would never surprise him (or us), and weren’t in any position, as the now exiled Revolution had been, to demand their part in a genuine collaboration.The very thing that many of us thought was Prince’s ...

The Health Transformation Army

James Meek: What can the WHO do?, 2 July 2020

... killed 52,000 in Britain alone. ‘Our other plagues were home-bred, and part of ourselves,’ an anonymous English doctor wrote:We had a habit of looking on them with a fatal indifference, indeed, inasmuch as it led us to believe that they could be effectually subdued. But the cholera was something outlandish, unknown, monstrous; its tremendous ravages, so ...

Last Exit

Murray Sayle, 27 November 1997

The Last Governor: Chris Patten and the Handover of Hong Kong 
by Jonathan Dimbleby.
Little, Brown, 461 pp., £22.50, July 1997, 0 316 64018 2
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In Pursuit of British Interests: Reflections on Foreign Policy under Margaret Thatcher and John Major 
by Percy Cradock.
Murray, 228 pp., £18.99, September 1997, 0 7195 5464 0
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Hong Kong Under Chinese Rule: The Economic and Political Implications of Reversion 
edited by Warren Cohen and Li Zhao.
Cambridge, 255 pp., £45, August 1997, 0 521 62158 5
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The Hong Kong Advantage 
by Michael Enright, Edith Scott and David Dodwell.
Oxford, 369 pp., £20, July 1997, 0 19 590322 6
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... devices, the Independent Commission against Corruption, which solicits and follows up anonymous tip-offs by mail and telephone; Venetians were motivated by cash rewards to slip the names of bribe-takers into the mouth of a stone lion located (for privacy) behind St Mark’s Cathedral. And, like Venice, a major source of economic strength lies not ...

I told you so!

James Davidson: Oracles, 2 December 2004

The Road to Delphi: The Life and Afterlife of Oracles 
by Michael Wood.
Chatto, 271 pp., £17.99, January 2004, 0 7011 6546 4
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... them down. The New Testament seems by contrast the least convincing of all the holy books, full of anonymous pseudonymous texts by who knows who, from who knows where, written who knows when: forged Letters of Jesus’ Brothers, ‘of James’, ‘of Jude, brother of James’, ‘of Paul’ and ‘of Peter’, who seems to have found time between fishing trips ...

My Darlings

Colm Tóibín: Drinking with Samuel Beckett, 5 April 2007

... to Beckett because of its dense texture and its deep simplicity. The painting was bought from an anonymous dealer in 1996 by the National Gallery of Ireland, which is not far from the studio where it was painted, and it hung in the gallery’s show Samuel Beckett: A Passion for Paintings, which marked the centenary of Beckett’s birth last year. Its ...

The Hijackers

Hugh Roberts: What will happen to Syria?, 16 July 2015

From Deep State to Islamic State: The Arab Counter-Revolution and Its Jihadi Legacy 
by Jean-Pierre Filiu.
Hurst, 328 pp., £15.99, July 2015, 978 1 84904 546 9
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Syrian Notebooks: Inside the Homs Uprising 
by Jonathan Littell.
Verso, 246 pp., £12.99, April 2015, 978 1 78168 824 3
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The Rise of Islamic State: Isis and the New Sunni Revolution 
by Patrick Cockburn.
Verso, 192 pp., £9.99, January 2015, 978 1 78478 040 1
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Isis: Inside the Army of Terror 
by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan.
Regan Arts, 288 pp., £12.99, February 2015, 978 1 941393 57 4
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... there are hands from different parties involved who want to decide on behalf of the Syrians.’ Anonymous sources told Al Jazeera that al-Khatib was not a ‘team player’. In January, without consultation, he had publicly offered to negotiate with the Syrian government. Presumably he believed his colleagues would dissuade him and so presented them with a ...

Palestinianism

Adam Shatz, 6 May 2021

Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said 
by Timothy Brennan.
Bloomsbury, 437 pp., £20, March 2021, 978 1 5266 1465 0
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... with used condoms. ‘You are now under surveillance and two of your associates know it,’ an anonymous correspondent wrote to him. ‘Don’t think you’re too small for this. Look for cameras – you won’t find them.’ Informants at Princeton, Columbia and the Harvard alumni office assisted the FBI in an investigation that examined his banking and ...