“... structures of state and church and acknowledges their authority.Perhaps as a result, the paint is anonymous – the character of a mark does not attract attention to itself except when a change of surface texture – say, between one fabric and another – must be registered. (David would let this French tradition of brushwork be the vehicle for political ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Night or Henry IV Part I – are by a Fleming in Paris called Adam de Coster and a dazzling anonymous who, identified only by his lodging in Rome, gets labelled ‘Il Pensionante del Saraceni’. These and five other exhibits turn on the biblical episode in which Peter denies Jesus. The gospel text specifies a courtyard at night and a maid who knows ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”