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“... 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 ...”

“... foreshadowings of the gulags. More’s Utopians would have recognised the sumptuary laws of the anonymous Island of Content (1709) and James Burgh’s Account of the Cessares (1764), the rotation of office and minimal laws of William Hodgson’s Commonwealth of Reason (1795) and the natural religion shared by most of these ideal commonwealths. They might ...”

“... still lifes, painted in the controlled environment of the studio, have none of the smooth, anonymous finish which became common in 19th-century academic painting – what Baxandall calls the ‘licked trickery of trompe l’oeil’. But they do have an extraordinary verisimilitude, which seems to come from a highly ‘backtracked’ account of what the ...”

“... Gertrude Stein, whom she found obnoxious and overbearing, and in the mid-Twenties contributed an anonymous autobiographical essay to a series in the Nation which was entitled ‘These Modern Women’. There’s virtually nothing about the Maida books in Irwin’s papers at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard. But as a child I identified with them with the ...”

“... out, there are many records of prolonged and loving female friendships in the 18th century, and anonymous independent women by the score who depended on each other’s society, but apart from stylised Utopias and parodies, like Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, there are no explorations of the topic, although one should add, thinking of the role of ...”

“... 16th-century masterpiece. The Marriage at Cana, hitherto assigned to some anonymous ‘Alchemical Master’: this discovery is one of the major satisfactions for the reader who has read the works of the trilogy in the order of their publication. This is not the same, however, as the chronological order of the events they describe. The ...”