“... 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 ...”

“... to compile a collection of them, two pages of which were solemnly presented in evidence. When an anonymous leaflet attacking the authorities circulated in the College, it was sent to a language specialist to identify the author. A Swansea PR firm was hired by the College to put the case against the complainants. Even so, the campaign forced the University to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... action and import, moment and significance. In ‘Blank card’ the narrator is sent flowers by an anonymous admirer, and the jolt of perceiving herself as the discreet object of someone else’s desire revives her feelings for her partner. The unknown leads her back to the deeper and more enduring mystery of the known; and the story ends with her delivering ...”

“... Jews’, a performance intended for the other passengers, a way to become integrated and anonymous. The rabbi dispatches Mendel, a member of his rudimentary troupe, to bring back needle, thread and scissors from the entertainers in the next carriage (‘These costumes, as is, will surely never do’) and to find out the ‘secrets’ of a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... new phase, and Lisa’s banality merges into her role as a victim of history. It’s as an almost anonymous figure – uncertain even if she’s a Jew, because of what her analysis has brought to light about her parentage – that she perishes in the massacre of the Jews at Babi Yar. Anna G.’s visionary writings have a double meaning, in more than a ...”

“... transports in powerfully erotic terms. There is no evidence of any serious controversy, but one anonymous polemic did complain that the chaste virgin was exhibited as ‘una Venere, non solo prostrata, ma prostituita’. Indeed, to emphasise her physical abandon Bernini portrayed the saint prostrate rather than kneeling, and she is also raised upon a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he was obliged to defend his Church from another assault, constitutional this time, but again anonymous, sponsored by Thomas Cromwell. The antagonist was an eminent and now elderly lawyer, one Christopher St German, and he was attacking the temporal jurisdiction of the Church through the existence and the practice of the ecclesiastical courts. Since he ...”

“... as his central example in the first essay not even a chronicle, but the apparently vestigial and anonymous Annals of Saint Gall, where the only continuing thread of the discourse is the bare succession of years. Even here, he suggests, there is no warrant for the view that the annals are defective or meaningless. ‘The modern scholar seeks fullness and ...”

“... till of the Beginish restaurant in Green Street. Reproduced on the cover of the race-card was an anonymous quotation which I was unable to source: ‘The great man was alarmingly humble – and knew that Ascot and Dingle races were akin.’ The great man wasn’t an official of the Irish racing establishment, I suspect, because it doesn’t recognise the ...”

“... into the continuum. I hope it is giving this elegantly produced book its due if I call it anonymous: egoic interference is minimal, the poet wills himself to disappear into his text. The fate of this degraded, fought-over, misrepresented landscape, between the nexus of railway stations and the loop of the canal, is what concerns the ...”

“... refrain which shepherds the winding cortége of Dunbar’s ‘Lament for the Makaris’, to the anonymous Gaelic bard exhorting ‘Ar sliocht Gaodhal ó Ghort Gréag’ (‘The Gael’s race from the Field of Greece’) on the eve of the Battle of Flodden in 1513. That is followed immediately by a nearly twenty-page selection from Gavin Douglas’s great ...”

“... 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 ...”