“... in medieval medical recipes, both consumed and applied to the body during pregnancy and labour.An anonymous Italian painting from the 15th century offers a more comprehensive view of the lying-in chamber, where the pregnant woman would retreat for weeks before and after giving birth. A new mother sits in a four-poster bed, listening to a seated woman who has ...”

“... fulfilment’ of her promises to Mende elders (who remain, nevertheless, with one exception, anonymous). What we have, in fact, is not a revelation of the mysteries of Sande, but a respectful approach to them, by an art historian who has tiptoed where anthropologists feared to tread. She found, she said, that Mende women were willing, even keen, to talk ...”

“... own. The voice of a couple of the ‘East’ stories hovers between written and spoken, between anonymous Standard English narration and the inflections of an Indian or Pakistani man in the street. The latter would not be likely to say, ‘The bus was brightly painted in multicoloured arabesques,’ whereas the former would not say of a rickshaw-puller’s ...”

“... protected sugar loaves. But between those writers who wrote for the happy few, and the mass of anonymous hacks who pandered to the ready market of the credulous and the curious, there were writers such as Dumas who ought to demand our attention and concern. Why was it that he was so famous that wherever he went he was the centre of interest and ...”

“... prepare a magazine article about a building disaster that has killed 20 people. He is harassed by anonymous letters accusing him of murdering his wife and threatening him with death. Sickened by his assignment, and by the violence of the city, he retires to the mountains of New Hampshire, to a remote estate, left him by an uncle, where he proceeds to build a ...”

“... criminal justice system.Unfortunately, there has been no improvement since then. The blogger and anonymous author of The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It’s Broken (Picador, £16.99) exposes as a sham the claim that victims are at the heart of the system. They turn up at court, but the court has overfilled its list, and so they have to return ...”

“... Anonymous city, handheld camera, actors who scarcely seem to be acting: we may think we know where we are, more or less. This is surely the New Wave by way of Neo-Realism, early Truffaut chasing late Rossellini. Didn’t we get over this? How could a film in this vein, namely L’Enfant, written and directed by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, win the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year? To say nothing of the same prize won by their film Rosetta, a venture in just the same vein, in 1999 ...”

“... the ‘disease model’ of addiction still underpins such therapeutic undertakings as Narcotics Anonymous, practitioners and policymakers increasingly use circumlocutions such as ‘problematic’ or ‘misuse’, which frame it as a behaviour rather than a literal illness. In other branches of medicine, the strict pathological view of addiction has been an ...”

“... the success of the WikiLeaks’s ‘communications infrastructure’ in keeping the leaks anonymous. The whistleblowers, he said, could never be prosecuted and the material could never be used in evidence. But this has proved to be wishful thinking: it is alleged that US Army Specialist Bradley Manning, 22, presently awaiting a military tribunal, was ...”

“... to identify the donor, claiming to have given him his ‘word of honour’ that he would remain anonymous. For 16 years Kohl had done his best to make his party subservient to him. Now no one felt able to stand up to him. No one, that is, except Angela Merkel. While Kohl took refuge behind his ‘word of honour’ and the CDU tried to sweep the ...”

“... fine body, once admired across the beaches and ski slopes of Europe, was decomposed, anonymous, and forgotten. He had disappeared, body and soul, somewhere between monarchy and modernity, having lived a life so rich and strange as not to require an age of its own. During the Second World War, Wilhelm found himself in Vienna, wearing the uniform ...”

“... impressed. The time is 1985. The Berlin of the film is all greys and blues and yellows, static, anonymous. It is not ugly or grim, it’s rather beautiful in its bleached out way, and doesn’t offer the usual architectural allegory of oppression in the East. The place is merely subdued, soaked in unspoken sadnesses, and the acting, excellent in every ...”

“... to be kept in mind is the disinhibiting effect of the anonymity accorded by the internet. While anonymous phone calls and letters have been around for a long time (I received my fair share of the latter during my years as a judge), the ubiquity of insult and calumny in the everyday vocabulary of social media plays a not insignificant part in the ...”

“... set off from Northumbria bound for Rome, taking the Codex Amiatinus with him. The anonymous Life of Ceolfrith describes how the monks sang and wept as his boat set sail on the River Wear. The book was intended as a gift for the shrine of St Peter, but it never made it. Ceolfrith died en route and the Bible ended up in the monastery of Monte ...”

“... wrote about getting hold of his own FBI file and discovering that during the 1990s, following an anonymous tip, he was suspected of being the Unabomber. ‘UNABOMBER, not unlike VOLLMANN, has pride of authorship and insists his book be published without editing,’ the agents wrote. They interviewed an acquaintance who told them he had a ‘death ...”