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Snooping

E.S. Turner, 1 October 1981

Nella Last’s War: A Mother’s Diary, 1939-45 
edited by Richard Broad and Suzie Fleming.
Falling Wall Press, 320 pp., £9.95, September 1981, 0 905046 15 3
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... In a storeroom at Sussex University lie the records of Mass-Observation, an organisation of anonymous people-watchers which in its heyday ran into much criticism. Some of its supporters made large claims for its methods and findings; respectable journals hailed a new form of social research, while others jeered; Evelyn Waugh complained of ‘pseudoscientific showmanship ...

At the Royal Academy

James Davidson: ‘Bronze’, 11 October 2012

... Jasper Johns’s sarcastically monumental cans of beer, the Americans outclassing the dismal and anonymous contributions from modern British sculptors – where’s Barry Flanagan when you need him? Jake and Dinos Chapman? Antony Gormley RA? But as I moved around Room 1, which contains perhaps the most far-flung group of human figures ever gathered in close ...

Loserdom

Thomas Jones: The Novel as Computer Game, 25 September 2008

The Broken World 
by Tim Etchells.
Heinemann, 420 pp., £14.99, July 2008, 978 0 434 01833 8
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... to them later or simply telling readers to work those bits out for themselves. The narrator, an anonymous young man in an anonymous town somewhere in America, is also endlessly distracted from the game by the even more intractable problems of the rest of his life: his dead-end job manning the phones at a third-rate pizza ...

Not Enjoying Herself

Jenny Diski: Princess Margaret, 16 August 2007

Princess Margaret: A Life Unravelled 
by Tim Heald.
Weidenfeld, 346 pp., £20, July 2007, 978 0 297 84820 2
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... as well as a couple of former ladies-in-waiting. There were also those who chose to remain anonymous, for all that Heald understands that ‘this can pose problems for outsiders who will think this is a bluff and that no such secret informants actually exist.’ But most of his research was done while being carefully supervised in the Royal Archives in ...
Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky 
by Patrick Hamilton.
Hogarth, 528 pp., £4.95, June 1987, 0 7012 0751 5
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Trust Me 
by John Updike.
Deutsch, 249 pp., £9.95, September 1987, 0 394 55833 2
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Her Story: A Novel 
by Dan Jacobson.
Deutsch, 142 pp., £8.95, August 1987, 0 233 98116 0
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... The little boy is not Moses, nor is he Jesus, though he might be either, as well as being an anonymous little boy. And that is an image of the way Dan Jacobson has constructed his story – his story being Her Story. It makes a remarkable novel, of a most unusual kind. It shows the unexpectedness and versatility of Jacobson’s powers as a novelist, but ...

Starting over

Malise Ruthven, 9 July 1987

Cities on a Hill 
by Frances FitzGerald.
Picador, 414 pp., £4.50, March 1987, 0 330 29845 3
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... terms with the outside world mainly as a result of Aids. An initial refusal to face the fact that anonymous ‘high-risk’ sex in Castro’s celebrated bath-houses had greatly facilitated the spread of Aids gave way to a collective decision to acquiesce in their closure. FitzGerald documents this transition, made much more painful by the assassination of ...

Like Oysters in Their Shells

Malcolm Gaskill: The Death Trade, 18 August 2022

All the Living and the Dead: A Personal Investigation into the Death Trade 
by Hayley Campbell.
Raven, 268 pp., £18.99, March, 978 1 5266 0139 1
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... and disposal of your corpse. Their work is discreet and business-like. By and large, they’re anonymous. Most people in the developed West hide from the reality of death, and those who don’t, those who make a living from it, are hidden from us. Hayley Campbell wants us to peer into this strange world, not least because it’s where we’re all heading ...

Degree of Famousness etc

Peter Howarth: Don Paterson, 21 March 2013

Selected Poems 
by Don Paterson.
Faber, 169 pp., £14.99, May 2012, 978 0 571 28178 7
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... steadier light, he knows the pure verse, when it finally comes, will sound like a mountain spring, anonymous and serene. Beneath the blue oblivious sky, the water sings of nothing, not your name, not mine. The contradiction between a voice warning you to expect no affirmation from the anonymous calm of pure poetry and the ...

Committee Speak

Robert Alter: Bible Writers, 19 July 2007

Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible 
by Karel van der Toorn.
Harvard, 401 pp., £22.95, March 2007, 978 0 674 02437 3
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... the term today, and the Greek tragedians, composing their plays for competitions, were scarcely anonymous members of teams of scribes. Another highly competitive literary culture that set a premium on the achievement of the individual author was the Arabic and Hebrew poetry of medieval Spain; from time to time, a poet would even inscribe his signature in ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: Military intelligence, 4 April 2002

... passed by him to the German Embassy.’ Still, ‘Hugessen’s career was a successful one,’ the anonymous obituarist wrote, ‘and he was fortunate in never having had to meet a situation demanding more of him than he had to offer’ – the Cicero Affair clearly not counting as a ‘situation’. Indeed, it was ‘proof of the high regard felt in the ...

Internal Combustion

David Trotter, 6 June 1996

The Letters of Rudyard Kipling. Vol. III: 1900-1910 
edited by Thomas Pinney.
Macmillan, 482 pp., £50, December 1995, 9780333637333
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... letters he wrote to his wife describe his intense admiration for the ‘emptying out of love in anonymous work’ which had enabled Cézanne to render the ‘substantiality’ of the natural world. What finally persuaded him, however, of the essential loneliness of Cézanne’s effort to strip away the preconceptions which separate us from that world was ...

Am I intruding?

Peter Campbell: Open Windows, 3 November 2011

Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century 
by Sabine Rewald.
Yale, 190 pp., £20, March 2011, 978 0 300 16977 5
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... let alone views, but there are enough that share Friedrich’s cool insistence that you enter his anonymous space and find its unspecified meaning for yourself to make you realise that his work had given a new emotional edge to room painting. The exercise Friedrich’s window pictures offer the imagination comes more often with poetry. Most obviously, in the ...

Everything but the Glue

Richard Fortey: A Victorian sensation, 22 August 2002

Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret Authorship of ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’ 
by James Secord.
Chicago, 624 pp., £22.50, February 2002, 0 226 74410 8
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... superficially appealing but lightweight. Indeed, there were several female candidates for ‘anonymous’, based largely on the perceived ‘femininity’ of the book’s style. Viewed in this light, the comparative dryness of Darwin’s style could be seen as a guarantee of its sincerity and excellence – the word of a gentleman in a particular ...

Pick a nonce and try a hash

Donald MacKenzie: On Bitcoin, 18 April 2019

... is straightforward. When you join bitcoin, you use its software to generate for yourself an anonymous electronic address, along with a ‘private key’, which is a long string of binary digits that your computer uses electronically to sign a transaction, and an associated ‘public key’ that others can use to check the validity of that electronic ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: Thomas Pynchon, 8 May 2003

... The soundtrack is provided by the Residents, ‘the world’s most famous unknown band’, an anonymous group of avant-garde multimedia artists from San Francisco. At the very end we get to see the two unauthorised pictures of Pynchon. One of them is the handiwork of a hack called James Bone, who tracked the novelist down and took him crassly by ...

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