“... by a hodgepodge of new developments. The town is ‘everywhere and nowhere’; it is ‘perfectly anonymous’. The unnamed – and unlovely – Irish town at the centre of Sansom’s spirited and generous first novel owes something to his relocation. Ring Road’s entertaining preface denies the debt – ‘the town is not meant to be a replica of any ...”

“... serves as the justification for what the large majority of individuals experience as a vast anonymous power regulating their lives. As to the ideological aspect of their struggle, Frank states an obvious truth which, nonetheless, needs to be restated: the populists are fighting a war that cannot be won. If Republicans were effectively to ban ...”

“... Manhattan these days. The Lemur’s extras are smiling waitresses, not seen-it-all barkeeps; its anonymous New York voices say ‘yes-how-may-I help-you?’ not ‘how you doin’?’; its background noise is the hiss of espresso machines. If you don’t catch a ride to the Hamptons with your father-in-law in his chopper you must endure the discomforts of ...”

“... The traditional philosophers, Aristotelians, the Schoolmen, were content with mystery. In 1638 an anonymous speaker at the Bureau d’Adresse offers this version in a debate on the causes of tidal motion:Just as it would be fruitless to wonder what the cause of a horse’s motion is, given that even the most ignorant people recognise that it comes from the ...”

“... are Egyptian working-class people, the others are of various nationalities, but each is relatively anonymous and poor. None is given a place in the main plot, but all are allowed extensive musings on their daily lives, their loved ones, especially their children. Thus in the story Porpentine reports on climbing a tree so as to look into the hotel room where ...”

“... under pressure to publish material of doubtful scientific quality have had to erect a screen of anonymous editorial advisers and ‘referees’ to sieve the wheat from the chaff. Then, as now, the financing of scientific journals has been slightly uncertain, delicately balanced between the very different needs and resources of individual ...”

“... a Dichter, if he does not seriously doubt his right to be one’; and Canetti goes on to quote an anonymous diarist (it may have been the Berlin poet Oskar Loerke) who wrote ten days before the outbreak of the Second World War: ‘But everything is over. If I were really a poet, I would have to be able to prevent the war.’ Paying homage to the sense of ...”

“... Samuel Johnson, but the periphery takes more pages, and is concerned with Lowth, Priestley and the anonymous ‘Brightland Grammar’, works which will be not much read again. No one is going to accuse this writer of populism or of mere propaganda. In the chapter called ‘An Unerring Gaze’, Barrell tries to set more firmly within the period the type of ...”

“... Jamison in The Recovering, a memoir of addiction that doubles as a cultural history of Alcoholics Anonymous. ‘If you are grossed out by “white girl privilege” (who isn’t?), you might want to bail now,’ warns Cat Marnell, the author of How to Murder Your Life, another addiction memoir, but an altogether more desperate and amusing book than ...”

“... He is accompanied by Anthony O’Donnell, a pinhole photographer who trades under the title of Anonymous Bosch. When Bosch herds the fractious troubadour rabble into a group shot, his skullcap, made from the lining of Kötting’s felt helmet, gives him the aspect of an assistant executioner waiting for a crack at Mary Queen of Scots. All the marchers had ...”

“... or wild man. Early modern playhouses like the Globe could manage nothing on this scale; yet the anonymous Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes, performed by the Queen’s Men in 1576, includes a mysterious Forest of Marvels among its locations, and in a number of other plays stage directions call for characters to appear ‘in the forest’, or ‘in the ...”

“... and Anne Garréta.* In this vein, I would add that Sarraute’s insistence on the impersonal and anonymous aspects of language and subjectivity strikes me as consonant with Barthes’s ideas about a politics of style, an egalitarian utopia of the neutral. But even if we believe that her writing lends itself to such political uses, we should acknowledge that ...”

“... time. The text had been vetted by the Harvard Theological Review, and although two of the three anonymous reviewers had been sceptical, the world’s leading papyrologist, Roger Bagnall, had pronounced the fragment genuine. King had assured Sabar that with some minor revisions the HTR would go ahead and publish, which in due course it did.Hell hath no fury ...”

“... the house style, but they ought to breathe a sigh of relief that at least their pieces can stay anonymous. Worse still, in some of the pieces which were originally signed, we become uncomfortably aware that, since we last met him, the narrator has become a celebrity. He takes holidays on Patmos, opens basketball games and gives the Memorial Day address at ...”

“... Kinnock as a member of CND. ‘All over Europe every country is rejecting socialism,’ said the anonymous voice-over. The Seventies were a disastrous decade for Labour. Harold Wilson’s somersault on the Common Market split the dominant Centre-Right of the Party. For the first time since the early days of Bevanism, the Soft Left saw its chance. While the ...”