“... enjoyed being on display. Beyond the cricket green to the right, one could see a steady stream of anonymous commuters hurrying to catch trains, either at the Church-gate station which lay on one side, or the Victoria Terminus on the other. When the bombs went off three weeks later, I was back in Calcutta. Once more, it was BBC Asia that first told us about ...”

“... into ‘a kind of people’. They begin to represent the lost of the world, its victims, the anonymous multitudes of history. In an earlier poem Mahon wrote of ‘our lives in infinite preparation’, and, in this poem, lives are evoked as having been waiting, patiently and in silence, to deliver an appeal. They are begging us, you see, in their ...”

“... given by the press secretary of the day. This civil servant, the authors assert, is the anonymous provider of more stories than all the Whitehall officials and cabinet ministers put together. There are, though, occasional high days when premiers themselves take a hand, but whether present or not, it is they who dictate the tone. Not all first ...”

“... Eliot’s career we can see the difficulty of sustaining a voice undaunted. The acerbic wit of her anonymous early essays is muted in the novels into compunction, though a compunction penetrated with irony. Mrs Cadwallader in Middlemarch pronounces with the dashing directness and exaggeration of the free spirit such as Mary Mohl; the narrative is burdened with ...”

“... ground from which an English National Liberation Army may one day emerge. The embattled, anonymous prose-style they share speaks for a dissenting population within an entity which used to be confidently referred to as ‘Great Britain’ but whose imminent fragmentation is prophesied by Tom Nairn and others. Unfortunately, Dr Widdowson and most of ...”

“... article has Hutton’s fault of seeing so very far into a millstone.’ And Woodfield quotes an anonymous writer in the Academy in 1899, who found ‘something Titanesque in the way Mr Hutton set himself each week to appreciate, to explain, to flout, or to annex to his own service the ripe thought of his day. None escaped ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... tend to use their real names and pictures on social media, Chinese users prefer to remain anonymous online. ‘Momo’ was once the default name provided by Chinese social media sites for newly registered users, and young people found it convenient. They formed the ‘momo army’ and adopted the slogan: ‘One momo did a bad thing; millions of momo ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... cell-mate, for example, who had built up a splendid career for himself by writing endless anonymous denunciations, which were always believed. Chonkin’s destiny, and the title of the book, are determined by the discovery in the course of a vast bureaucratic investigation that his nickname in his native village was the Prince. From this, by a ...”