“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... television screens defining the limits of his editors’ freedom. We do not read of attempts by anonymous senior executives at News International to suppress comment or sack editors who have infringed unwritten company policy, but of swashbuckling, tough-talking Rupert. It is Robert Maxwell, not his BPCC, who is perpetually on the touchline of any new ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the published corpus by a letter either sent or received.’ We can imagine White’s anonymous editor smiling as he recognises the success of his strategy, but the fact remains that anyone who was anyone had Cicero somewhere within his web. The great majority of the surviving letters are from the last few years of Cicero’s life, as he strove ...”

“... attention to Bentley’s extreme arrogance, so when he defended a reading in Horace’s Odes, the anonymous ‘Bentleian’ annotator added this gloss: The Dr. having called together an Assembly of Criticks, by the Names and Titles of most Learned, most Accurate, most Ingenious, most Judicious, most Illustrious, and so forth, tells them when they are ...”

“... spree, have an unpleasant arbitrariness to them. ‘The background was not domesticity, but the anonymous life of the dance-halls and the false values of the American film.’ Orwell uses the words ‘wanton’ and ‘callousness’: ‘There is no depth of feeling in it.’ In October 1946, eight months after Orwell’s only partly humorous complaint about ...”