It's a description that carries the flavour of journalistic laziness, but there is something common to their ability to largely efface themselves from their prose, and their skill at drawing meaning from the lives of everyday rural people: teachers, farmers, labourers and policemen.
When I'm trying to avoid writing 'I,' I try to step back and evaluate whether it is actually necessary to efface myself from the text or not.
Only the death of words effaces them from the text.
In his finely graded sentences, nature writer Robert Macfarlane gives us the textures and smells and experiences of what is out there, beyond us, and his careful calibrating of each phrase actually effaces him from his texts.
In this book Persson and Savulescu claim that neither our current moral software – our morality of common sense as they call it- nor the institutions of liberal democracies are capable of coping with what they label as "ultimate harms": the perils of terrorism and climate change which might efface human species from Earth.
"Time has not yet served to efface your blonde handsomeness from my retentive memory, old keed".
(In "Easy," class similarities only mask, but don't efface, cultural differences arising from racial identity).
Nasser envisioned a pan-Arab movement led by Egypt that would expel the British from the Middle East, efface Israel, and restore Islāmic grandeur.
And her only novel, Don't Look at Me Like That (Granta £6.99, pp187), is concerned with visibility and the various ways its heroine finds to efface herself or even vanish from view.
And that dawning suspicion, I now conjecture, was what has made me efface the success of Alice and her dog from my memory: I was ashamed of my success then and there, stricken in medias res.
