“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... who consumed a three-foot octopus (except for the head), and nearly died of dyspepsia; the anonymous alcoholic immortalised by Aristotle, who put eggs under his mat and sat on them and drank continuously until they hatched. Not many readers nowadays will need the reminder that the Greeks were not all mind and marble. Davidson, however, presents them as ...”

“... Victorian England’. The Marquess of Queensberry, Sir Edward Carson, Max Nordau and the gloating, anonymous readership of small-minded newspapers like the Daily Mail: these are the villains of the Wilde story, but they may have more in common with us than its hero. Homophobia, for instance, is a modern phenomenon: before Wilde, there was really no such figure ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... well in hotel rooms,’ Calvino says in the title-piece of this volume, in that kind of abstract, anonymous space which hotel rooms are, where I find myself facing the blank page, with no alternative, no escape. Or perhaps this is an idealised condition which worked most of all when I was younger, and the world was there just outside the door, packed with ...”

“... environment of the club, which catered particularly well to socially mobile newcomers lost in the anonymous urban scramble: Men feel their weakness, and to numbers run, Themselves to strengthen or themselves to shun; The need for buddies, identified by George Crabbe, explains why the English club was homosocial through and through, serving as it did to ...”

“... Series) and Arnold’s friend Fanny Brice. Contrasted with these somewhat comical figures are the anonymous victims of persecution: the ‘child-kin’ from Poland in the 1930s, interrogated by a ‘peaked cap’, and the Holocaust dead, recalled in the image of ‘smoke . . . fling[ing] and flail[ing] itself . . . from a crematorium/at Auschwitz’ and in ...”

“... may be poetry’s Peter Pan, but he is also its St Sebastian.) The necessarily rather anonymous ‘I’ of the early poems becomes a fully developed character, very close to the poet, a habitual fall-guy for the poems, like the further alter ego, ‘Sonny Jim’. A lot of 1980s and 1990s Williams barely pretends to be poetry. The poems straggle ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”