“... story is,’ she boasts – Lucy Marsden tells her story, and many other people’s stories, to an anonymous listener equipped with a tape-recorder. The garrulous old lady’s Carolina brogue is not wholly consistent, however. ‘Novocained’, ‘unguided missile’ and other coinages are part of her vocabulary, and it seems that a ghost writer has been at ...”

“... press and he joined Altrincham in the pillory. They received some 2200 letters, the majority anonymous and vile – many of them from evidently respectable sections of society. Altrincham was sent a human turd in an OHMS envelope. Muggeridge, who had lost his son in an accident eighteen months earlier, received one letter saying: ‘With reference to ...”

“... It may be appropriate here to invoke the concept of a ‘surrogate racial attack’: the anonymous bogus tip-off to a social services department or an environmental health officer about purported child abuse or excessive noise that is maliciously made by those whose age or social class exclude them from the ranks of conventional perpetrators of ...”

“... to give Federal bureaucrats and their families a human face, as victims and survivors instead of anonymous pen-pushers, is insipid almost to the point of masochism. If the best the Democrats can do is to ask people to be grateful for all that the state does for them, then they will repeat exactly the condescending errors that cost them the Congress last fall ...”

“... mention was made of black people in the London press. Many had run away from their masters to lead anonymous, fugitive lives. Some died of poverty or went to sea; some were transported to America or, more commonly, Australia. Others had moved to different parts of Britain. The custom of giving Africans garish or geo-specific names like Mungo, Pompey or Black ...”

“... Perhaps he drove Heinrich into a position where he had no choice but to ‘sink down into the anonymous mass of his fellow evil-doers – the storm-troopers’. The problem is compounded by Joachim’s own ambiguous response. His reaction on discovering Heinrich’s Nazi uniform in his flat is to spit all over it. But when Heinrich returns with a Nazi ...”

“... quite as much a time of incipient revolution as the era in which the action was set. The novel was anonymous, but it opened by naming a more powerfully evocative name than the author’s, that of the dedicatee, William Godwin. Its first critics responded by reading it politically and, as Baldick shows, judged its merits largely according to their opinion of ...”

“... new kind since the last war. Today roughly half of French people live in small towns, and half in anonymous cities, but even the former no longer have much in common with the traditional urban life he describes. The motorcar, the telephone and television have created a new sort of imagination: France no longer feeds on its past: instead, it munches Hollywood ...”

“... were originally contributions to similar dialogues, which answer or parody poems by friends or anonymous fellow labourers. When such poems are printed as The Poems of —, or even with more of a recognition of incompleteness as in Suckling’s The Golden Fragments of —, the effect is often that of hearing a mono remastering of a stereo ...”

“... paid for a third item in Oslo or Monaco to be easily discovered. Private consignors may wish to be anonymous for other reasons: above all, a reluctance to publicise their wealth or their loss of it. There are of course other, less reputable reasons for obscurity. Lacey, it seems, has been listening to the people in marketing: ‘Gucci, Moët, Hermès, Chanel ...”

“... of his tract is different from Francis Place’s careful devising of headings for his sequence of anonymous handbills on contraception, issued in the same period: ‘To the Married of both Sexes’, ‘To the Married of both Sexes in Genteel Life’, ‘To the Married of both Sexes of the Working People’. One is the effort of a man with a bee in his ...”

“... encounters a ghostly, red-eyed, half-flayed steer. The book has as its epigraph the words of an anonymous rancher. ‘Reality’s never been of much use out here,’ he observes, while Proulx herself notes that ‘the elements of unreality, the fantastic and improbable, colour all of these stories as they colour real life. In Wyoming not the least fantastic ...”

“... still lived in cellars. ‘If Manchester in our era has a uniform,’ Haslam writes, ‘it’s the anonymous lad, hooded and hidden from the watchful gaze of CCTV.’ If Manchester music has a legendary sound, it is the empty-factory echo of Joy Division. The book spends less time on the city’s happier recent exports – trophy-winning football stars and ...”

“... that the poetry consists in the connections he has made between apparently disparate episodes: an anonymous phone call in New York, bizarre conjunctions, an affair with Lady Q., a bit of bohemian life in London – ‘In Francis Bacon’s queer after-hours club’ – and one Pericles Belleville. At a very formal dinner party, At which I met the woman I have ...”

“... and Hugo Wolf are patently distinguished, and, to judge from the bibliography in his edition, only Anonymous has contributed more to the TLS. Perhaps I should have left those hounds in mid-stream; they dry themselves so wetly. But then I remember his point about the leaves ‘ruled on one side by an impressed style’. Since the dogs have heard this ...”