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“... 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 ...”

“... when he went to call – but because he came to suspect her, quite falsely as it seems, of writing anonymous letters about his relations with Meta Bradley. Written in the perennially modish continuous present, Belinda has all the smart and forgettable air of a modern novel, but her earlier books had given Rhoda Broughton a reputation – she was a friend of ...”

“... Irina, but he has in ‘the Field archive’ a signed document ‘which must remain temporarily anonymous’. He goes on to summarise Nabokov’s own confession of his extra-marital affairs. ‘There had been one time when he had intercourse with a German woman in a forest on the outskirts of Berlin, after which he had had nothing more to do with her. Then ...”

“... names. The effort to pin down the real authors is not much assisted by the usual dictionaries of anonymous and pseudonymous literature, which is why Kearney’s title-author index is especially valuable – though it also represents a dead end, because few of the owners of the ‘real’ names have ever qualified for admission to biographical ...”

“... stories, The London Embassy is a sequel to The Consul’s File. The ‘narrator’, teasingly anonymous, has been promoted from far-flung Ayer Hitam to the plum job of political officer at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square. It sets up that narrative cage, or hide, which is now a Theroux speciality. He is the spectator indulging an affectionate ...”

“... unfaithful. Lilly tried not to get mixed up in cases involving stolen property: there survives an anonymous letter to him dated 1650 promising he would be ‘wonderfully beaten’ if he continued to accuse Dr Luke Ridgeley falsely of theft. Above all, we can catch Lilly at work reading his client, not the stars. Thus he reports that on 16 June 1646 at 19.26 ...”

“... that anybody is influenced by them, but a great many people are. An aggressive roomful of Smokers Anonymous announces that next to that story their own problem ‘seems like bullshit’. A literary gathering responds with cries of ‘Jesus’ and ‘How about a book?’ Poor Uncle Jim, who has Aids and gets the worst story of all, just sits in silence and ...”

“... I am shall make me live’ – has a name and distinct character. The people of the City are anonymous and, apart from a cripple trying to revert to infancy, all grimly stoical. Macbeth and Lear have earned their hell by wrong actions. In Thomson’s hell nobody has been notably wicked. Some remember an existence in which they tried to fight injustice or ...”