“... unemployment succumb to prostitution. The medical educationalist Abraham Flexner – evidently the anonymous ‘student’ whom Theodore Dreiser mentions in his introduction to Londres’s book – spent two years at John D. Rockefeller’s request compiling his report on Prostitution in Europe (1914). Returning to the topic in his autobiography a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... which he refused even to discuss with them. Now I hear that a sensational document from an anonymous ‘top Chinese source’, purporting to give the full inside story of the Lin Biao affair, has been paid for somewhere in Gray’s Inn Road. Cash first, verification later.If the British have found the whole Hitler diary business funny, the West Germans ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to be completely wrong after centuries of acceptance. Portraits of Macchiavelli turn out to be of anonymous merchants, paintings by Rembrandt turn out to be by his imitators, and the copy in the basement turns out to be by Raphael. Like all of us, Wollheim has been deeply affected by the reputations which certain painters enjoy – reputations reflected in ...”

“... migrants who crossed the Atlantic as indentured servants. It was easy, I suppose, to take these anonymous individuals for granted. They fit conveniently into a mythology in which the poor of the Old World become prosperous in the New. To be sure, just enough migrants clambered up the social ladder to give credibility to the notion that colonial America was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was echoed by his admirer and biographer, the military historian, Basil Liddell Hart, although an anonymous reviewer of Anthony Nutting’s Lawrence of Arabia: The Man and the Motive in the TLS was to mock this notion that all wars could be won by adopting Lawrence’s tactics: ‘No one ever defeated an enemy by avoiding him: all that can be done by avoiding ...”

“... handed 100,000 francs and allowed to escape by the back door. The intrepid M. Quelquejay and the anonymous wrecker were exceptions. Most of the Humberts’ creditors were helpless puppets, worked by the sinister hand of Thérèse’s brother, Romain. While Thérèse herself destroyed lives at a distance and kept a record of her successes in a carnet de ...”

“... notebook that a ‘lovely glittering aeroplane’ had passed overhead. Around the same time, an anonymous French soldier saw an artillery-spotting German Taube puttering past. ‘There is that wretched bird which haunts us,’ he noted. No longer could aircraft be uncomplicatedly adored. Both Hoffman and Tobin glide over the details of the role of aircraft ...”