“... up with that outrageous oxymoron, a science of subjectivity. At the core of the human subject lay anonymous forces which constituted it all the way through, yet of which it was necessarily oblivious. At the root of human meaning lurk processes that are not in themselves meaningful. Literature could train you to be as exquisitely perceptive as the author of ...”

“... called Elia Capriolo, angrily reproaching the Dominican inquisitors of his city in a sensibly anonymous pamphlet of 1505: You seize from the Valcamonica certain old women who are stupid and frozen in a kind of mental daze, and you interrogate them about their faith, the Trinity, and other such topics. You bring in scribes and drag out proceedings; you ...”

“... that contrasted with ‘the endless casualty lists and the sheer horror of mechanised, muddy, anonymous death’ on the Western Front. It also corresponded with Lawrence’s notion of medieval warfare and offered him scope for the kind of ‘heroism’ he had craved for himself ever since his adolescent reading of Greek and medieval epics: knightly ...”

“... of one. This is implicit not only in his hectic meeting and greeting but also in his semi-anonymous prose, which calls to mind the language of a collective Wiki-brain. For a Bildungsroman of a kind, Ways of Curating doesn’t display much personality; Obrist is rather like Warhol in this regard (certainly they share a compulsion to record), a cipher ...”

“... mystic and author of The Conference of the Birds – a very different literary creature from the anonymous author/compiler of Tales of the Marvellous. The translator, Malcolm Lyons, has rendered these stories with brio, but has kept close to the text – he hasn’t tried to patch up non sequiturs, repetition, mistakes of continuity, and he keeps the ...”

“... on Terror and the invasion of Iraq. There is none of the edgy and smart electricity of Haddad’s anonymous city here: on the American campus he is satire’s equivalent of a fox in the henhouse. The ideological sink of undergraduate identity politics is nearly as suffocating as the traditional social codes Rasa’s mother contested. Under the deadly narrow ...”

“... folly, and Fitzharris – with an eye for the narrative arc – recounts the humbling of her hero. Anonymous letters to newspapers accused Lister of intellectual theft. His methods were denounced as ‘obsolete and inelegant’. In a broadside reminiscent of those levelled at Darwin, one opponent castigated Lister for portraying nature as ‘some murderous hag ...”

“... jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile.’ The second epigraph comes from one of the most famous anonymous ballads, ‘Tom O’Bedlam’, to which Jackself returns at the close, with a song in which a bedlamite is ‘summoned’ to journey ‘ten leagues beyond/The wide world’s end’. What is there to find? Wren is hopping on the window ledge come ...”

“... the dead, but differently, with incommensurable poetics.Few poems are more cryptic than the anonymous early 14th-century ‘Earth upon Earth’, to which Smith devotes an entire chapter:Earth took of earth earth with woeEarth other earth to the earth drewEarth laid earth in earthen troughThen had earth of earth, earth enough.All is reduced to the stuff ...”

“... on the rebuilding done soon after 413; Lane Fox prefers the one c.470. Disputes over the dates of anonymous ancient texts may seem recondite, but Lane Fox leads us down intriguing paths of epigraphy, political history, philology and archaeology. Divagations along the way introduce us to Thasians such as Theogenes, an all-star athlete whose ...”

“... anniversary of Anthony Sampson’s Anatomy of Britain, which gave a pioneering analysis of the ‘anonymous institutions’ that seemed to be running the country, and the relations between them. It was the most famous of several books published in the early 1960s exploring the idea of a British ‘Establishment’, as part of a discussion about failure in ...”

“... influential. In areas of cultural analysis, at least, academic discourse has discarded much of its anonymous formality. Women have profited from the change they initiated. Much of the success achieved by feminism within institutions is due to its politically-motivated affirmation of the personal. The feminist practice has been to construct thought round ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... last he had, of the old sort. “A happy new year to you too, Dr Marat,” he said.’ Even the anonymous narrator, who often intervenes to paint the scene or keep up to date with events, is inclined to be ‘superior’ and jokey. VERSAILLES: a great deal of hard thinking has gone into this procession. It isn’t just a matter of getting up and ...”

“... 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 ...”