“... of unknown soldiers from 1915, cross-checked a discrepant map reference and proved a hitherto anonymous body to be John Kipling’s. He was one of the first in his regiment of very many. Some years after the war Kipling wrote a moving story called ‘The Gardener’, in which a single parent who has always disguised her son as an adopted nephew, goes on ...”

“... would never in a million years work for Dominic Cummings – is relegated to a minor role as an anonymous ‘weirdo’ hireling. Verity Jane, in Gibson’s new novel, Agency (Jane is her surname, as in Jane’s Fighting Ships), is the same sort of age (33) as Cayce and has the same sort of niche job: she is an ‘app whisperer’, according to her ...”

“... sound witty. Only she would think to frame the history of the Batrachomyomachia in the voice of an anonymous mouse scholiast and offer such a rich history of the close connection between mice and scholarship. In a relief by Archelaus of Priene entitled ‘The Apotheosis of Homer’, the bard is seated with the nine muses, some characters from his epics and a ...”

“... from Netanyahu to Abbas: if there was ever an image of hypocritical falsity, this was it. An anonymous citizen played Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’, the unofficial anthem of the European Union, as the procession passed under his window, adding a touch of political kitsch to the disgusting spectacle staged by the people most responsible for the mess we ...”

“... reports. The Illustrated London News’s reviewer was fully aware of the staginess of Fenton’s anonymous self-portrait in uniform (‘not unmindful of creature comforts’ was his comment on the bottle of beer), but he recognised its representative value: he is ‘bent on his duty, and is cocking his formidable weapon, with a keen glance at some outlying ...”

“... Fehim Spaho, in February 1942, contributed to a sense of disorientation. In November that year an anonymous letter was sent from someone close to the mayor to the German command, begging Hitler to establish a protectorate. The letter pledged allegiance to the Führer, and supported his anti-semitic policies, but its main purpose was to ask for an end to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for an ever smaller fraction of the overall body count – a few murders amid a welter of other, anonymous deaths. A cadaver seen at the very beginning of Silver Bullets soon disappears from view (‘a man, 45 or 50 years old, the detective calculated, 5’9”, Versace shirt, barefoot, castrated and with a bullet in his heart … we don’t need his name to ...”

“... gave people a place to go where they could ignore others, but also observe them. One could remain anonymous or be seen – at the latest place or at the best table. Unless, of course, one was condemned to play that other, equally essential role in the drama of the restaurant: that of the man outside staring in at the merry eaters with hungry eyes. Amy ...”

“... is a story of failed aspiration. John is attracted to the idea of cutting loose and becoming an anonymous, unidentifiable wanderer, like Michael K, but he ‘is too prim, too afraid of getting caught’ to sign off, to fall out of the system. Though he reads avidly about explorers and longs to be an existential stranger, he is, in fact, a timidly ...”

“... equipment that surround the real thing, a cheerless garden of sorts has been constructed out of anonymous bushes, some metal seating and a few incongruous lumps of granite. As if to remind visitors that there really is no such thing as nature unmediated by power and paranoia, even this botched amenity has been hedged round with barbed ...”

“... arrest an art smuggler, Nazzareno Corradi, who has rushed to the drug smuggler’s hotel after an anonymous phonecall has told him that his Colombian girlfriend is there and seriously ill. The defence lawyer calls the Alligator in to help establish Corradi’s innocence. His actions are hampered by the moral code of the underworld: no grassing and all ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... key sample came from a patient living ‘near Canterbury’. A medical source, who wanted to stay anonymous, told me that the variant was first identified in Margate and came from someone with a weak immune system. Some in Kent jibbed at the prospect that the new virus would be known to history as ‘the Kent variant’, drawing a parallel with Trump’s ...”

“... 20th-century whereas Keating only started signing his work after 1977. That didn’t matter. My anonymous little picture had acquired an author and a story. It was part of the newspaper sensation of the 1970s and 1980s which saw Keating’s criminal career exposed, largely through the diligence of the art critic Geraldine Norman, who had become suspicious ...”