“... editors of a recent anthology of the Writings of William Walwyn (Georgia, 1989) ascribe it to an anonymous Leveller in exile. There is no doubt at all who wrote The Hunting of the Foxes, an ever-topical assault on revolutionary grandees who betray and persecute the people who fought for them. ‘Was there ever a generation of men so apostate, so false and so ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... became a passport to an entirely new world’; in ‘Rocketfire Red’, Jones skilfully evokes an anonymous waitress’s rough-edged Australian vernacular as she transforms herself into a model by using the hair dye that becomes her moniker. These characters are overtaken by their desire for change. And so again the eponymous boxer from ‘Dynamite ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... surgeon. The spectacular mésalliance generated a lascivious frenzy in print, including an anonymous Bridal Ode on the Marriage of Catherine and Petruchio.Macaulay’s History had attracted the admiration of patriots in the American colonies. She corresponded with Abigail Adams, the wife of John Adams, and with Mercy Otis Warren, later herself to ...”

“... of characters assembles in her apartment, speaking sometimes as individuals and sometimes as an anonymous collective. ‘This is my life now not a dream It’s as real as this city of Paris.’ Literally? Yes:You can put the universe    and all the souls that exist    in a cigar boxIt’s all in my two-room apartment    everyone seems to ...”

“... change.’ Language was often tidied up by lexicographers and literary texts cleansed. When an anonymous Georgian author published a modernised version of Chaucer’s ‘Miller’s Tale’, the words ‘hole’ and ‘ers’ were replaced with ‘buttock’ and ‘bum’, and Alison’s verdant pubic hair, described by Chaucer as ‘rough and long ...”