“... 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 ...”

“... it, of ‘Albion’ – on the Labour machine mouthpiece the Leeds Weekly Citizen. From this anonymous pulpit he abused grousemoor Tories, metropolitan eggheads, unofficial strikers, disbelievers in the Yorkshire sage Harold Wilson and all those too feckless to see the connection between muck and brass. Reading his reprinted stuff, which was mostly ...”

“... an anthology of rhetorical tributes to the pencil, the most appalling of them emanating from an anonymous source: I am the pencil, the first chronicler of new-born thought. I come from the sleeping granite beds, and the balsamic frills of kingly cellars. In my heart, I carry the black carbon of Pluto’s world – half-brother to the diamond. I memorandum ...”

“... they would rather be in prison. Graef is sympathetic, and before long you begin to doubt him. An anonymous judge, speaking to him, wishes that ‘transportation were still available’. ‘I’d like nothing better than to take one of these youngsters who’s reappeared for the umpteenth car theft and say: “You’re a thoroughly bad sort. Off you go to ...”

“... He could not afford a public scandal. In the following January, Spielrein’s mother received an anonymous letter advising her to look to her daughter. She wrote to Jung, whose answer implied – plainly, whether truthfully or otherwise – that he had not had sexual relations with Sabina. He concluded on a professional note: his normal fee was ten francs ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... brilliant portraits of other Nurembergers. At the same time he was courting a far-flung and anonymous public who ultimately brought him much greater fame than any previous German artist: the consumers of woodcuts and engravings. In these works Dürer depicted familiar sacred stories, including the lives of Christ and the Virgin, as well as such esoteric ...”

“... novel is regularly accused of being overstuffed with random items of little value. One anonymous reviewer complained in 1781 that inferior novelists found ‘throwing together’ anything they might ‘pick up’ a ‘convenient method’ of composition.Between the late 17th and early 19th centuries, women’s pockets usually took the form of a bag ...”

“... made his Frankish kingdom the dominant power on the continent. In around 799 he was lauded by an anonymous poet as pater Europae, the father of Europe. In more recent times too, the name of Charlemagne has been used to evoke an idea of European integration. Immediately after the Second World War, when historians looked back at Charlemagne across the ...”