“... ones roasting in the flames of Hell, nor would they abide notions of ‘physical corruption and anonymous bones’. Only the expectation of a heavenly reunion made loss bearable, and in keeping with the new aesthetics of death, only beautiful corpses – well-dressed, well-coiffed and well-preserved – would be sent on their way. In the 19th ...”

“... narrator. On his return to Paris after many years in America he writes: ‘At avenue Frochot some anonymous youngsters had covered the sidewalks and walls with chalked inscriptions: “Vive Jean Renoir”, “From La Petite Marchande d’ allumettes to The River, thank you,” etc. It seems they have not forgotten me in Paris.’ Then: ‘the people here like ...”

“... editors of a recent anthology of the Writings of William Walwyn (Georgia, 1989) ascribe it to an anonymous Leveller in exile. There is no doubt at all who wrote The Hunting of the Foxes, an ever-topical assault on revolutionary grandees who betray and persecute the people who fought for them. ‘Was there ever a generation of men so apostate, so false and so ...”

“... the first half appears to have no other objective but the placing of Canon Gareth Bennett – the anonymous author of the 1987 Preface who committed suicide when threatened with exposure – on some sort of martyr’s plinth. To most outside the embattled ranks of Anglo-Catholicism Oddie’s efforts to depict the former Dean of New College even as a figure ...”

“... the final form of letters now passed to a person (either the ‘designer’ or, more usually, an anonymous technical draughtsman) who made large-scale drawings that were then reduced, by pantography, to produce the necessary punches. The extraordinary and hard-won skills of the punch-cutter could then be bypassed, and the design of type was open to those who ...”

“... of patter, patois, argot – something shared in common – and that is why much nonsense verse is anonymous. The most sophisticated things in the genre play with this, which like many comic acts often palls before the player gives up. A real tale, such as that of Lear’s Jumblies or Dong, is like ‘Captain Carpenter’ or ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, but ...”

“... became a passport to an entirely new world’; in ‘Rocketfire Red’, Jones skilfully evokes an anonymous waitress’s rough-edged Australian vernacular as she transforms herself into a model by using the hair dye that becomes her moniker. These characters are overtaken by their desire for change. And so again the eponymous boxer from ‘Dynamite ...”

“... Perhaps, as Carey perceives, the nearest one comes to Forbes’s speaking voice is in the anonymous criticisms – ‘protocols’, we were taught to call them – contributed to I.A. Richards’s course of Practical Criticism. Of a rather portentous poem called ‘The Trees’ by J.D.C. Pellew, Forbes says: ‘Here we have the stoical sublime to ...”

“... so. Even if some women are prepared to have children through Artificial Insemination by Donor (an anonymous donor and no sexual involvement), not all, or even many, think this a satisfactory procedure. The old image of the family – if not the Victorian jumbo-family, then the smiling breakfast-family of the cornflakes advertisement – keeps reappearing in ...”

“... the front page of the New York Times affects public opinion. The same lie exposed years later by anonymous officials reminiscing, or thanks to a Freedom of Information suit, is mainly of interest to historians. For every exposé which Mr Bonner and the handful of other industrious reporters make there are countless tendentious stories which are never ...”

“... around the world where they do business. ‘It was the easiest money going,’ says one anonymous banker: ‘you just took 1 per cent on the turn, for signing a cheque for a few million dollars.’ That is why the big banks have been falling over each other ‘like starlings or lemmings’ in the last ten years or so to push out the huge ...”

“... songs are pure, except that horrid one Beginning with ‘Formosum pastor Corydon’. The anonymous limericks are a bore, as rude limericks often are, presumably because they insist on giving usually phallic point to a form that more easily takes to surreal inconsequence. Still, the book as a whole is a splendid collection and nothing less than a ...”

“... to comets as the origin of life on Earth in his theory of ‘directed panspermia’; in 1684 the anonymous author of a book called Cometomantia explained that ‘we must expect sickness, diseases, mortality, and more especially the sudden death of Great Ones’, after the passage of a comet; some explained the Great Plague of 1665 by appealing to comets; and ...”

“... sex talk bring the rest of life in only as asides. The classic English case is My Secret Life, the anonymous memoir of a Victorian gentleman who carried on a long-term, highly gymnastic sex life that never impinged on the rest of his experience. For him, the value of his recollections lay exclusively in sex; for posterity, it lies in practically everything ...”

“... who saw him in Fleet Street in the early 1900s’; and on the following page somebody equally anonymous acclaims the ‘World-Famous Literary Genius, G.K. Chesterton, the World renowned Essayist, Dramatist, Romancist, Poet, Brilliant Epigrammist, Wit, Phrase-maker, the Inspiring Philosopher whose ideas attract, fascinate, impress – make people ...”