“... 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 ...”

“... This brief, disconsolate and in certain respects disagreeable novel starts with the funeral of the anonymous (eponymous) hero and ends with his death. The circularity in the narrative is a powerfully expressive feature of a book whose formal intricacy could be thought the most interesting thing about it. Of course, we only fully appreciate the novel’s structural virtues once we have finished reading it, and if we came to it fresh from the invigorating experience of Sabbath’s Theatre or the American Trilogy or The Plot against America, and were hoping for something less well-behaved than structural virtue, we will have had a lot of adjusting to do ...”

“... episode, there is a long, long list of saints, the majority only too real, that includes ‘S. Anonymous and S. Eponymous and S. Pseudonymous and S. Homonymous and S. Paronymous and S. Synonymous’. The annotation tells us: ‘Not actually saints.’ An annotation for ‘Doctor O’Gargle’ in the Oxen of the Sun episode reads: ‘Not a real ...”

“... to her arm, leaning forward to plead with an upright, massively clad and armed soldier, his anonymous back to us, the light on her face. The caption said the woman was begging the soldier to release the child, whom he had just arrested as a terrorist. It occurred to me that Kunzle is very good at suggesting that where the uneasy relations between ...”

“... of the countryside hanging on vulnerably under the noise of fighter-planes. There is something anonymous about the way Hofmann registers anonymity: ‘I was not myself, I was just anyone,’ he writes, an exile even to his own feelings and experiences. Where others might point the moral, he merely points, or lets his sentences dwindle to three full ...”

“... and they do not pique Ralph’s curiosity until thirty years later, when – thanks to a series of anonymous letters from an unlikely young woman – he belatedly turns into an obsessed researcher seeking to understand his own past. There is a murder mystery, which is also unresolved, and a reasonably disarming portrayal of a never-very-innocent youth on the ...”

“... to everything, it was impossible for me to cry.’ First published in 1986 and now appearing in an anonymous translation from Macmillan, Vincent-Buffault’s book concerns French tears rather than the British or American kind, but the general trajectory of the history she traces is a familiar one. Like other expressions of emotion in the modern period, tears ...”

“... involved Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. After eight months of horse-ripping in Staffordshire, a series of anonymous letters directed police suspicion to a young Anglican clergyman named George Edalji, who was the son of a Hindu. Edalji was convicted and sentenced to seven years’ hard labour. Sir Arthur, insisting that demons or ‘demonically-obsessed ...”

“... As early as 1972, I myself, when working on Private Eye, got ‘information’ from more than one anonymous telephone caller about ‘photographs’ which were supposedly circulating showing Edward Heath in flagrante with young men – and other members of his government engaging in similar behaviour. It is difficult not to get excited when such phone calls ...”

“... to discredit Iraq. We cannot know, since Ruth Freeman for reasons of personal safety has to remain anonymous and her claims beyond further scrutiny. For all the risks the authors are apparently taking, it is a pity that their book has not made the waters any less ...”

“... change from relational to pictorial thinking. As factory products filled homes, rooms ceased to be anonymous, undifferentiated spaces which add little information about individuals. Tasteful prosperity, affluence, vulgar superficiality, the threadbare and the tawdry were added to the earlier categorisation which allowed of wealth, prosperity, poverty and ...”