“... 12th-century poet Marie de France and the sublime Julian of Norwich – others may lurk behind the anonymous female-voiced lyrics in Old and Middle English. Wellesley devotes a few intriguing pages to a 15th-century Welsh-language poet, Gwerful Mechain, whose diverse oeuvre ranges from religious verses to an ‘Ode to the Vagina’ and a savage stanza ...”

“... the others will sing’). Encoded here is the recognition that everyday people often create anonymous culture that we ‘experience as an artwork, as chanter,’ and that he, ‘Kurt Schwitters, is the artist of the work of autres’: ‘I am the artist, who, through an act of delimitation, turned the song of others (which might be very bad) into an ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... when it happened: as, ‘1538, 6 March. The printer Jean Morin is Jailed for Having Published the Anonymous Cymbalum Mundi,’ or ‘1925, November. At 56, André Gide publishes Les Faux-Monnayeurs, His First Novel.’ Then, by way of a temporal recap, at the end there is a second list, of for the most part political French dates, progressing from the Roman ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and Catholic values of the ‘true’ Spain. He was but one of the tens of thousands of anonymous workers, farmhands, teachers, doctors and others who suffered the same fate in the Franquista rearguard. There is a final and terrible irony here. Had Lorca, in his panic of the days leading up to the Civil War, chosen to go almost anywhere but home to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 be cool and disengaged, to have its wits about it. The same cool is displayed in the two anonymous bawdy ballads which begin and end Whitworth’s collection, ‘Eskimo Nell’ and ‘The Ball of Kirriemuir’. It would be possible to enlist the former as a proto-feminist work, since its point is that, after much male bravado, Deadeye Dick gets his ...”

“... The ‘lovely boy’ whose name Shakespeare promised to eternise in his sonnets remains bleakly anonymous. All this is fascinating, as is the perception that certain names in Twelfth Night are related almost anagrammatically: Olivia, Viola, Malvolio (corroborated by Malvolio’s own musing on the cryptic letter he finds). What does Professor Barton think of ...”

“... to have been convinced that The Satanic Verses had been misunderstood. Other Muslims, such as the anonymous author of a lengthy analysis of the novel that was recently circulated to university English departments, have arrived at the same conclusion. Unfortunately, the notion that Rushdie’s intended meaning has been overlooked, and that his detractors are ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”