“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... taken its cut too, of course. In 2017 it launched an ‘electoral bond’ scheme that allowed for anonymous funding of political parties. By March 2023, 55 per cent of all money donated (65.7 billion rupees, or around £650 million) had flowed directly into the BJP’s coffers. The Congress received less than 10 per cent of donations.The BJP’s commitment 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”