“... 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 ...”

“... of my cage’. Her closest colleagues (Zetkin, Franz Mehring, Leo Jogiches) recognised that Jacob, anonymous and reliable, was better suited than any of them to play the role of official prison visitor. Tersely, Jacob explains her own dedication: ‘If there was anything to be done for her, my motto was, “enough is not enough.”’ Such a love does not ...”

“... parents, grandparents, children, siblings, friends, fellow soldiers, fellow prisoners, neighbours, anonymous persons whose lives crossed their own. The book depends heavily on extracts from more than a hundred formal and informal interviews conducted by the author, as well as various impromptu conversations she overheard or in which she took ...”

“... Robertson thought that the countryman Hogg was simply being used as a go-between by the real, anonymous editor of the Spy, and Hogg was happy to adopt this role. In the magazine itself, he developed his ‘Spy’ persona. The Spy is presented as an elderly Highland bachelor only recently arrived in Edinburgh. He is a failed preacher, failed farmer, failed ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and was escorted back in it after Trafalgar for solemn interment in St Paul’s. In the bleak, anonymous new cemeteries beyond human habitation, by contrast, rabid dogs would root up and mingle the bones of the virtuous with those of executed criminals. And much more to what might be preposterous effect, were it not for Foscolo’s compact and energetic ...”

“... Here a report from a Doctor Heron on a cavalry officer with a wounded left buttock. Here an anonymous sufferer from shivering-fits. Here a corpse found in a vineyard ‘stretched out by the palm tree and mutilated by dogs’. Here an extensive pharmacopoeia. Here a remedy for nosebleeds: ‘mix powdered frankincense with leek juice and smear the juice ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”