“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Dignitas clinic to put an end to his suffering from motor neurone disease, and who, thanks to some anonymous busybody, had been interviewed by the police under caution. ‘The current law on assisted dying is not working,’ she said, ‘and a huge majority of the public wants to see a change.’ Sumption responded, first, by questioning whether ‘decisions ...”

“... 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 ...”