“... its characters’ actions or make them interesting. Is Rakoff’s substitution of Alcoholics Anonymous for psychoanalysis a pointed comment on a culture obsessed with addiction, intervention and recovery? Or simple narrative exigency? Anarchism doesn’t occupy the same political or social position that socialism did in the 1930s, so why are there so ...”

“... definite article here doing away with definition), and he does not intend to stop now. As the anonymous narrator remarks of the scene in the hotel room: ‘It was an imbroglio. He would admit that much. But at least it was an imbroglio of Haffner’s making.’ Haffner is Jewish, but has long believed only – so the young narrator, a friend of ...”

“... shit’. Delrio replied: ‘The devil does not shit.’) The corrector Andreas Osiander added an anonymous preface to Copernicus’ De revolutionibus in 1543, informing readers that Copernicus intended his radical ideas to be a stimulus to debate, not a description of empirical truth. Of course, the truth was precisely what Copernicus knew he had ...”

“... things are still amiss. On 29 January, police officers in Rochester, New York, responding to an anonymous report of ‘family trouble’, handcuffed a nine-year-old girl they say was described to them as ‘suicidal’ and pinned her to a patrol car. Before they forced her into the back of the car, the girl, who was wearing flowered leggings and a black ...”

“... not have claimed for himself any of these so frequent attributes of the lately dead.’ These anonymous lapidations always have a Beckett-like vigor mortis. I have long collected them, as apt for Beckett’s key-cold charity. When not insinuatingly denigratory (‘He never married’), the obituaries are informed by a co-operative subconscious, and ...”

“... Joy (Euphrosyne) and Conviviality (Thalia). Only later were they lumped together in the anonymous and largely ornamental collectivity of the Three Graces. Although nowadays manners are usually considered separate from morals, the Greeks rightly regarded the reciprocity of charis as a moral force, because it served as a glue that held society ...”

“... first a serie of ‘lives’ or glimpses of lives – Hart Crane, Kurt Schwitters, Marvin Gaye, an anonymous serial-killer – starting appropriately with a bouncy account of reading Plutarch; the second a series of places, people and moments in the poet’s own life; the third a Mexican (and I think in one case Nicaraguan) travel journal. There is an ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... his own community, hence outside the system of patronage and publishing he was a ‘non person, as anonymous as the grass’ – but his distinctive words (‘crizzling’, ‘sliveth’, ‘whinneys’, ‘croodling’), each ‘a unique subversion of the uptight efficiency of Official Standard’. Paulin’s taste accordingly celebrates ecstatic primitives ...”

“... imagining her naked, making love to me in clandestine meetings – after her concerts, in big anonymous hotels on New York’s West Side; in out-of-the-way hotels in Paris, Rome, or Vienna; in motels in Los Angeles; in private rooms of the secret sex palaces in Rio de Janeiro.’ Some of this is meant to be pillow talk. Kosinski unwisely introduces people ...”

“... knew much less about the Bible than modern talk of an Age of Faith may suggest. In one anonymous continuation of the Canterbury Tales (the Tale of Beryn), the author imagines how Chaucer’s pilgrims might have spent their time once they arrived at Canterbury (which in Chaucer they never do). On a visit to the Cathedral, the Pardoner, the ...”

“... of the one below). Finally, in the top level, above an elevated platform where an endless line of anonymous workers shuffles to work in trains, the great metropolis rises; three cranes signal that the skyline is in active production. Frozen Assets is an inspired montage: Rivera based the vault on those he had toured in Wall Street and the hangar on the ...”

“... even though he’s run out of insulin). Kato emerges in best soap opera fashion from among the anonymous ranks of the hostages halfway through the book to fulfil an important plot function: ‘Without his playing the story might have missed him altogether.’ The first piece he plays is something called ‘Chopin’s Nocturne opus 9 in E Flat major no ...”

“... joined the International Brigades. The many thousands of other Chinese workers recruited remain anonymous; their presence is sometimes noted in studies of early Chinese Communists who travelled to France in the 1920s, but their participation in the war has been mostly overlooked. It’s a subject of great potential interest and Xu’s Strangers on the ...”