“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... coping strategies: pills to make it through his bar shifts; drinks lifted from behind the counter; anonymous sex. ‘I fucked around before I met Kai,’ he tells us, ‘hooking up here and there, but at some point after he died here and there became everywhere, all the time.’ After Kai’s death, Cam returned to Houston, his home town, but instead of seeing ...”

“... At the end of the Second World War, an anonymous pamphlet surfaced in the seminaries of Qom, the bastion of Shia learning. The Unveiling of Secrets accused Iran’s monarchy of treason: ‘In your European hats, you strolled the boulevards, ogling the naked girls, and thought yourselves fine fellows, unaware that foreigners were carting off the country’s patrimony and resources ...”

“... far outweighed coverage of the concurrent American War of Independence. There also appeared an anonymous, rabidly homophobic pamphlet, Sodom and Onan, almost certainly written by Jackson. Foote was not named, but the title page carried an engraving based on the Reynolds portrait of him, and the work was subtitled ‘A Satire Inscrib’d to ...”

“... partly because (being in that respect like Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr, for whom ‘the spring was anonymous’) I thought a work much concerned with botany sounded off my beat. Quite fortuitously, I reviewed A Mine of Serpents for the TLS myself, treating it more or less as a novel, which it was to only a very limited extent. There was some excuse for ...”

“... of several high-ranking German officials and a French diplomat). In 1918 Gide had published 21 anonymous copies and distributed them to friends. At that point he was still trying not to offend Madeleine, but after she burned his letters he no longer felt bound to protect her reputation or her sensibilities. Corydon was, accordingly, published under his own ...”

“... had been copied by friends (only two survive), and kept quiet about the authorship of his first, anonymous publication, ‘Pauline’, for over thirty years, until the threat of piracy forced him to acknowledge it. He disliked the idea of annotation, too: ‘Years of study of dictionaries and the like would make the student learned enough in another ...”

“... After a decade or more dominated by special studies of anonymous or bestselling authors now suitable for academic recovery, Philip Fisher’s Still the New World marks a return in some ways to an older and less suspicious idea of ‘classic American literature’. Fisher is a critic who has written extensively on realist prose and painting, and his new book is a commentary on Emerson, Whitman, Melville, James and Twain, among others, with significant asides on Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer ...”

“... are among our permanent national characteristics. So wrote one of Sir Walter Scott’s anonymous competitors in the preface to The Court of Holyrood: Fragments of an Old Story (1822), neatly describing the emotional dynamic by which narratives about Mary Queen of Scots, such as this historical romance itself, could be used to serve the purposes of ...”

“... the lost animal stars: Trigger, Rin Tin Tin, Asta, Pal and Champion the Wonder Horse, as well as anonymous beasts, like the 200 horses killed in the making of The Charge of the Light Brigade. If Weissmuller adopted Tarzan’s inarticulacy in real life in order to finesse away moments of awkwardness, then Cheeta more radically collapses the split between ...”

“... of miles away weeks or months before, were for a few hours neither refugees nor migrants, but anonymous travellers. Most of them marked the moment by going to sleep. I had bought my ticket for the bus one afternoon in late November, from a shop on Victoria Square in Athens, a busy plaza north-west of the city centre. A lot of the shops around here are ...”