“... 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 ...”

“... detractors, the ‘Endtrepreneurs’, incensed by her appearance on the Today programme, send anonymous messages ‘about the few and the many’ in the apocalypse ‘and something about Babylon’. The messages are laughable at first, then sinister. As Selima notes, ‘anthropocene destruction and eschatology’ are ‘not dissimilar’. The ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”