“... system, by design perhaps, there was little eye contact, and the rest of the team was almost as anonymous as the people whose web pages they worked up.’ Pamela has come to Talcott to scatter her father’s ashes, an act of exorcism as much as fealty, the father’s obsession having cut him off not just from the family but from life in general. J. vaguely ...”

“... workers leaving ‘Diamond City’ as fast as they could. The doctors had already gone. An anonymous, highly placed official was quoted in the Hindustan Times as saying: ‘We already know that the Surat strain was not Indian. We cannot rule out the possibility of militants purchasing the organism from a Kazakhstan company and releasing it in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the Madrid train bombings. Guttmann stresses the hypocrisies involved when a network operated by anonymous functionaries pursues what is in effect a covert foreign policy. Officially, the governments that supposedly control the European members of the club have always been critical of Israel’s settlement policies in the Occupied Territories, and ...”

“... the end, the picture was secured for the National Gallery at the eleventh hour by an anonymous donation of £40,000 from someone who wished only to be known as ‘a patriotic lady’. The Westminster Gazette duly ran a cartoon depicting Christina and John Bull embracing under the heading ‘Something has turned up.’ Unlike his friends John ...”

“... housemates by insisting: ‘I don’t really identify as anything.’ In chatrooms and forums, on anonymous message boards and blogs, ‘there emerged the option to be nobody in particular.’ If Bee can’t be free of personae altogether, she can at least be ‘sans corps – an entity of pure grammar, speech without the deception of flesh’. While her ...”

“... Richard Knighton, withdrew from an event at the Royal United Services Institute in late March, anonymous military officers told the Times that they had been ‘gagged’ by the government. (Knighton is due to be announced as the new chief of the defence staff.) A neat bureaucratic manoeuvre allowed the SDR to be presented as more of a revitalisation of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”