“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... something that has been understood by very few jewellers – is that most jewellery pieces are anonymous, even cold. A rope of Mikimoto pearls or a magnificent strand of diamonds can be given by almost anyone to almost any woman; the significance of the object lies only in its cost. Even rarity is up for grabs: there is much more manufactured rarity than ...”

“... wasn’t at all negligible even in the 16th century – as shown by the Tarih-i Hind-i Garbi, an anonymous Turkish text. Two centuries before al-Baghdádi, we have the account of Ilyas al-Mawsuli’s travels to Spanish America, of which not one but two recent translations into English exist. We ignore these works, and take Bernard Lewis as our guide, at our ...”

“... he collapsed in the street with pneumonia, coughing up blood. Redemption was threefold: Alcoholics Anonymous rid him of his chemical dependency, golf caddying at swanky LA country clubs gave him physical fitness and the milieu for his first novel, and writing it chipped him from the sand trap of failure. Thus far, thus familiar. In an era of literary ...”

“... Now they are unstoppable. As their popularity has grown, so have the conspiracy theories. An anonymous poster on the message boards at stieglarsson.com asks the all-important question: ‘What if he is pretending to be dead, and rises again, like Lisbeth from a premature burial?’ The three books that have been published were all completed before ...”

“... as to one in a dream from which it might be dangerous to be woken too suddenly. In the words of an anonymous writer, quoted in Greil Marcus’s morning-after ‘Real Life Rock Top Ten’ column: ‘Nothing more American than the faith that chickens will always go somewhere else to roost.’ Above all, we were warned – at least if you measure by my inbox ...”

“... the things that soldiers had seen, and done, were too distressing to recall. Peters cites an anonymous letter from the front, published as a pamphlet in 1643, in which the writer, addressing an unnamed ‘Sir’, has ‘forced’ pen to paper, but ‘can reduce things to nothing but confusion’. He tries again: ‘but you require my most serious ...”

“... science in opposition to the narrow specialisms that Poe saw hardening around him. It built on the anonymous and scandalous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), which had proposed a universe evolved out of diffuse clouds of matter, dispensing with a divine creator in favour of universal mechanical laws. It took inspiration from Alexander von ...”

“... mercurial character remained a source of bafflement to her Continental cousins. In 1678 the anonymous author of A Letter from Amsterdam to a Friend in England described it as ‘either the floating island, or founded upon quicksilver’. England’s unease is also conveyed by Devil-Land’s front cover, a detail from a Jacobean charter, which shows a ...”

“... and Lamarck, and paid tribute to the bestselling Vestiges of Creation, published in 1844, whose anonymous author ‘argues with much force on general grounds that species are not immutable’. As for the ‘principle of natural selection’, it had been applied to the human race by W.C. Wells in 1813, and extended to other species by Patrick Matthew in ...”

“... tearing from within her’.The crudest, funniest and most effective of the many Toft satires, the anonymous Much Ado about Nothing: or, The Rabbit-Woman’s Confession, ridiculed her illiteracy and promiscuity in an exposé ‘in her own Stile and Spelling’ that promised to get at the truth by ‘touching her in the Tenderest part, viz. her ...”

“... fob. Fleeing the feminised work that maintains the ‘macabre bourgeois house’, Hazel occupies anonymous and dirty chambres de bonne: ‘No need, no contract, no seduction: just the free promiscuity of a disrobed mind.’ She reads, drinks beer for lunch and embraces impersonal relationships. ‘I would go to kiss in a park all afternoon because that was ...”

“... military airfield in Saka in the summer, destroyed or damaged a large number of Russian warplanes. Anonymous Ukrainian officials said at the time that their country’s special forces had done the job. But had they? In an unusual essay in September, Ukraine’s revered military commander in chief, Valery Zaluzhny, claimed that the airfield had actually been ...”