“... exposure was the point, that he wanted to show off, here where nobody knew him, where he could be anonymous and free, could live out an ideal of candour. I felt his cock hard between us; it turned him on to show off like this, I had had no idea.The tone is that of someone contending with matters of enormous moral heft. In What Belongs to You, the earnestness ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in someone he slept with or he got drunk and blurted out what he’d done. Rumours circulated. An anonymous letter hinting I was alive was slipped under the door of his aunt and uncle’s house. Then, in January 1967 a Chilean friend passed through Barcelona and asked de Biedma for Miquel’s address. He gave it to her, but told her I had left Miquel. The ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... who we never hear from again. Slangy framing devices (a list of phrases taken from the Alcoholics Anonymous handbook, for example) and the use of self-help clichés to explain her characters’ motivations are distracting, as are her poorly constructed sentences and tendency to change tense several times within a paragraph or even within a sentence. Sometimes ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... see a large patch of brown, representing freshly turned ground: this is where the city sends its anonymous dead, to be buried by prison labour. There are also things you could not have seen before: the basketball courts in the centre of prison buildings on Rikers Island, a Sopwith Camel biplane parked on the roof of an office building near Wall ...”

“... young? They are followed by more women, and by the men belonging to these women, who seem somehow anonymous, bystanders at a parade of meaningful looks and strong perfumes. In theory, these women shouldn’t impress their femininity on you; that’s what the dress code imposed by the Islamic Republic is designed to prevent. Their hair and the shape of their ...”

“... pack up your knives and give them to a friend.’ From time to time the book is addressed to an anonymous, perhaps absent, second-person listener, whose identity remains shadowy. At first it seems that this may be a lover: ‘Just before you left me for the first time I had a dream and you were in it.’ We later learn that this person is a woman, but not ...”

“... admiration of her mother. Mr Harvey has left a trail of dead girls behind him as he moves from one anonymous suburb to another, and Susie’s turn comes when, walking home from school through a cornfield one day, she runs into him and accepts his invitation to have a look at a bunker which he has dug in the ground and furnished with a battery-powered lamp and ...”

“... correspondents, most of whom share a hatred of Republicanism and a heavy reliance on anonymous police and intelligence sources, is that there is no genuine political motivation behind the attacks. Militant Republicanism is just a front for criminality: the ‘dissidents’ don’t want regular policing in the border counties in case it disrupts ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”