“... comment, rather than reviews: At a time and place unknown, at a secret trial conducted by anonymous judges and prosecutors, Nagy and three of his associates were condemned to death. The world learned of the trial, the verdict and the executions from one brief announcement on 17 June 1958. No bodies were handed over to relatives; there are no ...”

“... make a vigorous attempt to revive Confucianism. He did not succeed – indeed, according to an anonymous pupil, ‘he never gained a sympathetic hearing, no matter where he went.’ Hsun-tzu (340-250) did no better. ‘Li and i,’ sighed a student, ‘made no progress, and the attempt to change by teaching failed.’ A rival school of thought, known as ...”

“... popularity, has not been regarded with the seriousness which Shippey thinks it deserves. Was the anonymous TLS reviewer of 1955 so very partisan and wrong-headed to say of The Lord of the Rings: ‘This is not a work that many adults will read right through more than once’? Was Edmund Wilson such a careless simpleton to spell ‘Gandalf’ as ...”

“... and more tyrannical role in the constitution of feeling. Consider this poignant reaction of an anonymous woman of the early Thirties to Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness: ‘When I read [it] it fell upon me like a revelation. I identified with every line. I wept floods of tears over it, and it confirmed my belief in my ...”

“... confidence. The New Critics tend to look at classic texts as if they were contemporary and anonymous; with Pritchett, criticism is always busily attentive to history, character and random human traffic. Pritchett’s fiction is like this too – inevitably. He does not feel at ease with the stylised and the exemplary. In his essay on Borges ...”

“... few Tory MPs nowadays who have no business interests or consultancies. In 1988, some heroic and anonymous mole at the merchant bank Morgan Grenfell supplied me with a secret memorandum sent to his colleagues by a director of the bank, David Douglas-Home: ‘As you are all aware,’ Douglas-Home wrote, Andrew MacKay MP advises us on our political strategy ...”

“... of the emotions. ‘There is a sort of vitrifying process that chills all sensibility,’ wrote an anonymous ‘Habituate’ à propos Coleridge in 1876. ‘Whatever is done is done in pale, cold strength of intellect.’ ‘I have not felt anything for twenty years,’ Kavan said not long before her death. The lack of warmth and passion in her work, its ...”

“... about male sexuality. At the end of the book, Alex goes to Hampstead Heath and engages in quick, anonymous sex: he lets a man come over his face. Afterwards, surprised by what he has done, he feels that ‘he had just paid a visit to a remote suburb of himself.’ It is a typically lustrous phrase, but it allows us to realise that the weakness of this novel ...”

“... few surviving sources give any insight into its politics, and one that does is preserved only in anonymous fragments, the tattered scraps of papyrus found at Oxyrhynchus. The Oxyrhynchus historian takes a strong interest in Thebes’ affairs around the time of its sudden switch to a pro-Athenian stance, making it clear that the shift was largely due to a ...”

“... for justice and friendship did not die in vain – that in Benjamin’s phrase, the names of those anonymous men and women will be mentioned in dispatches on Judgment Day. The dead cannot literally be compensated for their suffering, but that suffering can be invested with new significance by our actions in the present. For the moment, then, the meaning of the ...”

“... discussed triaging tools were being used to determine the allocation of intensive care beds. One anonymous doctor is quoted as saying that, in the depths of the first wave, his hospital refused intensive care beds to anyone over 75. The mythology of the NHS as a universal refuge somehow survived, but only because such uncomfortable facts were hidden from ...”

“... Dignitas clinic to put an end to his suffering from motor neurone disease, and who, thanks to some anonymous busybody, had been interviewed by the police under caution. ‘The current law on assisted dying is not working,’ she said, ‘and a huge majority of the public wants to see a change.’ Sumption responded, first, by questioning whether ‘decisions ...”

“... golf. Occasional exercises in this genre have crept into the Christopher Logue selection. The anonymous ode to ‘Lizzie, my Old Car’. I love you though your radiator’s busted, I love you though your gudgeon pins are worn, smacks of the Dragon Book attitude that ‘light’ is synonymous with ‘suitable for children’, and the satire of ‘My Lord ...”

“... you heard the news? If you go to Pakistan you might be whacked.’ The organisers had received an anonymous letter threatening a fatwa and general mayhem if the lectures went ahead. The pretext was a de-contextualised paragraph from my novel The Book of Saladin in which a Christian heretic denounces Islam and its Prophet for being excessively addicted to ...”

“... summer’s posters feature a young couple, children running along the beach behind them, while an anonymous columned temple hovers implausibly in the Aegean haze. Greece, it seems, has no history except ancient history. In Turkey, too, you can swim in the morning, and climb up to the theatre of ancient Pergamon the same afternoon. But how many of those who do ...”