“... 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 ...”

“... on the burning deck in her most famous poem, ‘Casabianca’, but also in her attention to the anonymous and unmarked spaces of empire where bodies vanished beneath the waves or wasted away on the desert sands, uncommemorated and unnoticed. Such diminished spirits might justifiably continue to make claims on the living. The sheer scale of the destruction ...”

“... of a book (if they can be attributed to a famous person) or detract from it (if they belong to an anonymous student with a highlighter). In fact, Sherman points out, a 16th-century book could be described (in a 1952 sale catalogue) as ‘rather soiled by use’ and (in a 1953 exhibition catalogue) as ‘well and piously used’, with ‘marginal notations in ...”

“... definition of the proverb ignores the issue of gnomes, but her restrictions – a proverb must be anonymous, unauthored, the product of a group – still do not entirely account for her literary omissions: Shakespeare was a brilliant Mass-Observationist of imagery and language, with unsurpassed recording powers, and A Thousand and One Nights was compiled from ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as bringing a fresh idiom into Irish poetry. Here were poems of the Existentialist outsider, of anonymous points of departure, of endless lonely railway stations and hotel rooms. The critic Brian Donnelly, an early fan, recalls that Mahon’s face – unsmiling and goateed – on the cover of Night-Crossing, seemed to be ‘suggestive of things foreign and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... would never be alike extinguished on the ground behind them. Spectre horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat. Above all else they appeared wholly at venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order. Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”