“... 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 ...”

“... and Roa Bastos the Paraguayan writer. It begins, literally, with handwriting on the wall: an anonymous pamphleteer has nailed a piece of paper on the door of the Cathedral (shades of Lutheran rebellion!) apocryphally signed by El Supremo, in which the Perpetual Dictator orders that ‘on the occasion of my death my corpse be decapitated, my head placed ...”

“... Mr Harbison gets it ineffably wrong. The conception of a world beyond subject-matter, and myth as anonymous ambiguity, is met best by music which still bears traces of representation, operas of Wagner, early Strauss, and Debussy. Still? Still bears traces? Only Mr Harbison could have read the history of western music back to front, seeing it presumably, as a ...”

“... dreadful occasions at the Arts Council and local radio stations (there is also, pointlessly anonymous, the London Library again). But Maureen Duffy wants to sing a song of greater significance, and she has Jake working on a script about Villon. The translations are not bad, but the poet himself is sentimentalised out of recognition; and he’s there as ...”

“... intellectual history, the resurrection of long-forgotten ones, and the salvaging of vast tracts of anonymous discourse. Foucault always claimed that the past, as such, did not interest him: he was writing the history of the present. This was undoubtedly one of the predispositions that governed his outlook. It assumed many forms and sometimes had a surprisingly ...”

“... into action by an unusually active and conscientious bishop; Carnival on two accounts, one of them anonymous, of the events of 1579-80 in and around the city. The books contain comments on these sources, and on one aspect of the Carnival story one of the sources is skilfully used to get behind the silences and bias of the other, but there is no systematic ...”

“... action. But Ben is determined to avoid the sentimental traps of the drunkard’s den: his room is anonymous and new to him, he has burnt all his photographs, and he flaunts his trolley-load of famous brands. Sera is a welcome accident, come too late, a premonition of the bliss of for getfulness. They are, like Frankie and Johnny, heroes of a long, drunken ...”

“... join Paris in his bed after his narrow escape. The tale is told by Cumin, who supplies Homer’s anonymous old woman with a name – Teethee. Helen soon realises that she is speaking to the goddess and, as in Homer, bitterly upbraids her. But in somewhat different terms. Like any wife to any husband, she threatens to walk out. ‘Tu, Cumin, pack./Make sure ...”