“... occasionally Armitage has done much justice to these 2530 extraordinary lines, and has paid the anonymous poet the tribute of hard poetic labour. O’Donoghue is less sparky but still a very good read. ‘He grabbed the girdle and ungathered its knot/and flung it in fury at the man in front./“My downfall and undoing; let the devil take it,”’ says ...”

“... readers presents itself in the form of a cameo appearance by Raban himself, or at any rate by an anonymous writer, ‘a dishevelled-looking, spindle-shouldered older guy in a pink baseball cap that was too young for him’ – which is an accurate enough description of the photograph on the back flap of the novel. One of the ‘six professional stars’ of ...”

“... everywhere else. On the way to Auckland, I had to change buses. The café at the bus station was anonymous and bleak, like every bus station in the world, but the far wall was a bit special. It was covered in a mural so naive in execution it made Grandma Moses look like Dürer. It depicted the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse galloping out of the wall (if ...”

“... populi Romani, something paralleled (one could argue) by the respectful treatment of the chorus of anonymous Roman citizens in the play. Unlike the republican Cato, recited by Maternus Curiatus to a Vespasianic audience, the Octavia shared the perspective of those in power in Rome – just as The Capture of Miletus presumably shared the perspective of its ...”

“... impinged upon the very centre of the human psyche, through all the senses.’ He offers an ‘anonymous history’ of this impinging through case studies of such devices as the lock and the reaper and such procedures as the production of poultry and pork (which he calls ‘the mechanisation of death’). Giedion drew out two ramifications that Paolozzi ...”

“... In this series they include the Greek philosopher Hypatia, the Egyptian queen Cleopatra, and an anonymous Roman aristocrat known to us as ‘Turia’, whose bravery defending her family during the Civil Wars that ended the Roman Republic was recorded in a funeral speech given by her husband and inscribed on her tombstone. Theodora and attendants, from a ...”

“... just as the utterances of some character in a drama of his would be’. Pessoa said this in an anonymous article; and we note that whatever the names, and whatever ‘outside’ may mean, there’s only one person doing the writing. Not the death of the author then, but as Adam Phillips shrewdly said in these pages (17 July 1997), we do see a writer who ...”

“... airport. A small plane had taken him to Belle Glade, Florida, and then to Cuba. According to an anonymous letter sent from Canada, his corpse was buried outside Mexico City. The letter included a diagram and a cross marking the location of the body. This web of false trails again amplifies, almost multiplies the book. It in turn seems to be in touch with an ...”

“... to buy a reinforced door for his apartment. When I visited him last summer he was still getting anonymous phone calls. None of this will surprise anyone who has upset Polish nationalists in the past. Less expected, however, was the determined silence from the IPN, which commissioned Walkowski’s investigation. The IPN came under the control of the Law and ...”

“... renegade such as ‘has never been heard of before in any nation, or any age of the world’. One anonymous 18th-century poet thought Mandeville was the antithesis of Christ: ‘if GOD-MAN vice to abolish came/Who vice commends, MAN-DEVIL be his name.’As Douglass notes, Mandeville no longer possesses this diabolic notoriety. In so far as his work still ...”

“... him he didn’t have a clue.Grosz emigrated in January 1933. A year earlier he had told one of the anonymous Nazi paramilitaries who threatened him on the telephone: ‘Just come. I have two pistols, my wife also has two, and my friend Uli has a Basque walking stick with a bayonet! We’ll show you what’s what.’ He decamped to Long Island with his ...”

“... role in a play. Presumably, most of his students were privileged men; as Waterfield observes, the anonymous addressee is always imagined as masculine. The assumed student is usually a wealthy, privileged enslaver, whose problems include such trivialities as ‘the slave’ bringing water that isn’t hot enough. Epictetus advises the student who has been ...”

“... the cracks.Mental sleights of hand are passed down the generations. John’s response to receiving anonymous phone calls about his wife’s infidelity is instantly to ‘repress’ what they mean, allowing the nonchalant way he behaves in public to become the truth of the situation. ‘The phone call was too bad to be real except when he was ...”

“... Death of Sardanapalus, the high comedy of Byron’s Don Juan, the jolly pornography of the anonymous Lustful Turk or Rowlandson’s fleshly fantasies of plump, solicitous slave girls.Yeazell has explanations for what drew painters and writers to harem scenes and stories. In some cases, she suggests, it was a way to imagine the unlikely or ...”

“... showed him managing the Covid crisis, greeting Revolutionary Guard commanders or meeting anonymous ‘regional’ rebels, with slogans to remind us that his loss hasn’t dented the country’s identity or priorities: ‘still jihad’, ‘still security’, ‘still populist’, ‘still spiritual’. After the accident, some senior figures cast ...”