“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... from one Dorf to another: ‘Summonses to move appeared, like late library book notices and anonymous encouragement, in one’s mail-room cubby, faxed from foreign elders and always signed with love.’ Over the course of her life, Ruth is moved repeatedly, from Gracefield to Edendale to Cedar Hollow and onwards, from Minnesota to Ontario. In this ...”

“... At times he seems even to prefer speculations to actual findings. Thus he speculates that an anonymous review (‘The Matter of Coleridge’s Revolutionary Youth’, TLS, 6 August 1971) might have been written by E.P. Thompson, a speculation which could have been translated into a finding at the cost of a postage stamp. But his speculations do not always ...”

“... for a few years after that war – to accept invitations and patronage (which included a large anonymous gift from Wittgenstein), with no other resources to fall back on. Given the catastrophic state of the Reichsmark in the early Twenties, when Rilke was in Switzerland, the royalties he received from Kippenberg’s Insel Verlag were not enough to live ...”

“... secret self and to draw on its frightening, volcanic energies: ‘I must be private, secret, as anonymous and submerged as possible in order to write.’ The years from 1932 to the end of her life were not very productive for Virginia Woolf. Between 1927 and 1932 she had published To the Lighthouse, Orlando and The Waves, but in the last nine years of her ...”

“... The key text of Jacob’s Enlightenment was not the hugely expensive Encyclopédie, but an anonymous pamphlet called the Traité des trois imposteurs, which seems to have originated in the Netherlands around 1680 and was soon circulating in manuscript throughout Europe. The text varies from copy to copy, but the essential argument was that the ...”

“... agent in Salisbury. But often the comments are partisan, shrill or abusive. They also tend to be anonymous. Rusbridger describes what happened when, in the spirit of open journalism, the paper expanded its online op-ed section to bring in a broader range of outside voices and urged its highly paid resident columnists to engage with the below-the-line posters ...”

“... to be cool and disengaged, to have its wits about it. The same cool is displayed in the two anonymous bawdy ballads which begin and end Whitworth’s collection, ‘Eskimo Nell’ and ‘The Ball of Kirriemuir’. It would be possible to enlist the former as a proto-feminist work, since its point is that, after much male bravado, Deadeye Dick gets his ...”

“... and Catholic values of the ‘true’ Spain. He was but one of the tens of thousands of anonymous workers, farmhands, teachers, doctors and others who suffered the same fate in the Franquista rearguard. There is a final and terrible irony here. Had Lorca, in his panic of the days leading up to the Civil War, chosen to go almost anywhere but home to ...”

“... roles of temporal and spiritual leader, king and priest – ‘two powers in one body’, as an anonymous 17th-century writer once put it. As a temporal ruler Alexander VII controlled only a mini-state with about a million inhabitants, about a twentieth of the size of the France of Louis XIV. There was a Papal Army – commanded by Alexander’s ...”

“... The ‘lovely boy’ whose name Shakespeare promised to eternise in his sonnets remains bleakly anonymous. All this is fascinating, as is the perception that certain names in Twelfth Night are related almost anagrammatically: Olivia, Viola, Malvolio (corroborated by Malvolio’s own musing on the cryptic letter he finds). What does Professor Barton think of ...”

“... to have been convinced that The Satanic Verses had been misunderstood. Other Muslims, such as the anonymous author of a lengthy analysis of the novel that was recently circulated to university English departments, have arrived at the same conclusion. Unfortunately, the notion that Rushdie’s intended meaning has been overlooked, and that his detractors are ...”

“... of village, lineage, clan, tribe; the High Islam of scholars and rulers better expresses a modern, anonymous, mobile mass society. Islamic fundamentalism is not, then, a species of cultural atavism: on the contrary, like nationalism in the West, it is that phase of modernisation in which a High, literate culture becomes pervasive and membership-defining for ...”

“... when it happened: as, ‘1538, 6 March. The printer Jean Morin is Jailed for Having Published the Anonymous Cymbalum Mundi,’ or ‘1925, November. At 56, André Gide publishes Les Faux-Monnayeurs, His First Novel.’ Then, by way of a temporal recap, at the end there is a second list, of for the most part political French dates, progressing from the Roman ...”