“... that each remembered Malthus at a critical moment, and that evolution (to judge from the anonymous Vestiges, 1844) was patently in the air. Whether one embraces the inductivist models, or the stronger programmes in the sociology of knowledge, the conclusion might be much the same: simultaneous discovery eliminates the scientific genius. That would be ...”

“... Eliot and Prejudice, it has ‘the stamp of his approval and the stamp of his tone’. Calling the anonymous notice ‘shameful’, Ricks expresses the hope that ‘such cruelly self-righteous impercipience’ was later recognised by Eliot to be among ‘the things ill done and done to others’ harm which once he took for exercise of virtue’. Like Ricks, I ...”

“... quavers go and what crotchets sound like. The change had been made in the name of the People by anonymous tribunes so certain of their rectitude that to consult the congregation, much less let it decide, would have been tautological. After a few years of disgrace following the collapse of various ‘People’s Republics’, the ‘People’ are back with a ...”

“... quarto text that lies behind the oldest surviving translated version of any Shakespeare play, the anonymous Der Bestrafte Brudermord (eventually published in 1781 from a now lost manuscript of 1710, though it probably dates from nearly a century earlier). Back home, it was one of the Shakespeare plays that remained in the King’s Men’s active repertory ...”

“... National Book Awards or (in the academic community, at least) the Oscars. Decisions are made by an anonymous jury of 13 (the supernumerary is mysterious) whose deliberations are shrouded in conspiratorial secrecy. Behind the hooded 13 are a few hundred equally anonymous ‘nominators’ – genius’s snitches. You cannot ...”

“... picture of a ‘cultured rat bone marrow cell’, magnified 19,500 times. According to the anonymous author, the HeLa line was begun when cells were taken from the cervix of a 31-year-old Baltimore woman, for tests. The woman died of cancer eight months later but in the meantime some of the cells found their way to the lab of John and Margaret Gey of ...”

“... or from the intended targets of blackmail. One of Jacquet’s Parisian enterprises was a 60-page anonymous denunciation of prominent figures supposedly involved in schemes to make money from gambling and prostitution in the capital. The names of high police and government officials appeared in italics in the text with detailed accounts of how they had raked ...”

“... published novel called The Hobbit appeared in the Times Literary Supplement. The Hobbit was, the anonymous reviewer said, ‘a children’s book only in the sense that the first of many readings can be undertaken in the nursery’. It was to be compared to Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories, as belonging to ‘a very small class of books which have nothing in ...”

“... in Paulinus’ project at Nola a rather too comfortable strain of ‘designer poverty’. The anonymous social commentator who sometime between 408 and 414 wrote a radical pamphlet entitled On Riches doubted that the wealthy could ever find salvation, no matter how charitably they deployed their resources. At its root, all wealth was the result of ...”

“... it seems. The traditional detective wears a false beard in order to avoid being recognised, to be anonymous. Until he decides to give it up – for whatever reason, with whatever motive and intent – Tertuliano Máximo Afonso has been wearing his false beard, as is traditional, to aid his clandestine activities. He lurks outside António Claro’s apartment ...”

“... in a variety of ways. There is a phone number they can call anonymously (and it is truly anonymous), and there are email addresses to which they can report their concerns. Employees who would otherwise be too scared to come forward record genuine complaints in this way; others, perhaps engaged in personal vendettas, make slanderous claims about ...”

“... contrast which his authors draw between their conventional, bourgeois wives, asexual, pure, anonymous, ‘white’, and the raging, shrieking, demonic, castrating ‘red’ whores whom they see on the side of their opponents, seems to Theweleit but a colourful exaggeration of the paler dichotomies common in the conventional perceptions of women by men ...”

“... at which he awaits both a terrible death and damnation; but just as there is no death (except of anonymous others) for the text, so there is no damnation. In the end the stakes for Ian Wharton’s soul are just too damned low. Burrough’s great tetralogy is one precursor of this novel, but an even more obvious ancestor is Martin Amis’s Money. Both the ...”

“... Roy’s Introduction lucidly identifies and situates his text. The Chin P’ing Mei consists of an anonymous manuscript of 100 chapters, of which this volume, subtitled ‘The Gathering’, represents the initial 20. Roy’s will be the first complete, annotated edition in English. Four companion volumes, presumably of similarly mammoth proportions, will ...”

“... training today and so few have the opportunity to build anything more significant than an anonymous office block or house, whose form will be determined almost entirely by the technological constraints of mass-produced materials and conveniences (elevator, climate control), and by the political constraints of planning and safety codes. The turn to ...”