“... 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 ...”

“... Roger Lonsdale gives us a collection of 95 poets (including a fair sprinkling of the inevitable ‘Anonymous’). With each new writer he offers densely packed informative headnotes. The biographies alone are a valuable supplement to Janet Todd’s (invaluable but spotty) Dictionary of British and American Writers 1600-1800. Under the terms of Oxford ...”

“... There is an anonymous portrait of Dryden, ‘dated 1657 but probably 1662’, which shows a full-fed figure with plump alert eyes, comfortable and predatory. He seems poised between repletion and dyspepsia, like a bewigged Nigel Lawson, arrested for all time at the moment of incipient eructation. James Winn says: ‘His short, squat figure later led his enemies to call him “Poet Squab”, and the plump birdlike face in this picture justifies the nickname ...”

“... press, a miscellany of writings from Bloomsbury, a quirky Condition of England chapter in which anonymous ballads jostle blue books, and a pyrotechnic conclusion on the politics of language. The Longman is a polemical anthology. At the point when many feminist critics were either turning away from anthologies to photocopies and electronic databases, or else ...”

“... over from his previous situation a habit of systematic defiance, he exhibits himself to the anonymous inhabitants of the Great City: I’m not inhibited. I am often to be found bareassed in my shallow little room, my member pale against the background of the rest of my body, and I do not give a damn whether they see me or don’t, the ...”

“... 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 ...”