“... he must wear crash helmet, neck-protector and knee-guards. The community is governed by an anonymous council of bureaucrats. For the population at large there are two main pastimes. They can luxuriate in the Slow Time cabins (a French invention), where experience is decelerated; or they can trip with the Dream Diviners. Oneiromancy is frowned ...”

“... room in a dilapidated house owned by a Ukrainian, and it was high summer. On the landing, where anonymous feet scraped the lino by the pay phone, the first neighbour (if ‘neighbour’ is the right word here) paused and sniffed the air. A second neighbour joined the first. An hour later, the firemen broke down the door. My father was a failure. Even I, who ...”

“... each individual from everyone else as it is an ideology and a purely moral ideal’. ‘We’ form anonymous hurrying crowds, she says, sleep in separate rooms, live and eat in separate quarters, and move about within the closed doors of metal vehicles. ‘When we meet, therefore, with the express purpose of socialising, we cannot afford to be distant.’ She ...”

“... a pony-tailed man in army fatigues at a Washington bookstore. In Denver, bookstores received anonymous threatening faxes: ‘I understand that Ms Showalter will appear today at your store for a book-signing. Are you aware that she has been met with “outraged” patients? On one occasion she had to be quickly “whisked” away from the angry mob. I ...”

“... the man ‘who knows the local tales and traditions’ and who perpetuates ‘the voice of the anonymous storyteller, who was prior to all literature’; and in another essay (‘Johann Peter Hebel: On the Centenary of His Death’) Benjamin speaks of something (a certain kind of cosmopolitanism) that is ‘the mark of all spontaneous popular art’. But ...”

“... New Yorker; his crimes were acts of self-regard. Cooper’s men of violence are close to anonymous; they are not proud of, nor even stirred by, their actions. They live in barely-described suburbs, and rarely eat or leave or have a long conversation. They just pursue their obsession, which is always the same: the violation of thin young men. The ...”

“... 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 ...”