“... 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 ...”

“... to build St Petersburg, and it’s hard to say which was deadlier. Tens of thousands found their anonymous ends in the swamps of the Neva delta, whose islands enjoyed a reputation similar to today’s Gulag ... The universal coercion exercised by the future Bronze Horseman united the nation for the first time and gave birth to the Russian totalitarianism ...”

“... of his drinking. And while he recalls the details of his recovery – he went to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and was sober from 1947 – he doesn’t link his own alcoholism to his father’s, or discuss the fact that for the first half of his life, the sexual conquests he was so thorough in documenting all took place when he was half-cut. In 1949 ...”

“... my moan.’Lyrics in women’s voices also celebrated erotic pleasure. In a brief anonymous verse from around 1300, a maiden complains that her lover can’t satisfy her: ‘Alas, that he so soon fell!’ In a 15th-century carol, a woman describes her snappily dressed boyfriend in loving detail, lingering over his trim shirt and coat, his hose ...”

“... commuting in cars that double as personal offices and trash receptacles, going to McDonald’s or anonymous coffee shops and diners and, most of all, going to work: ‘I was a flask-shaped man in a velour shirt sitting at long lunchroom tables in business schools, cosmetology schools, junior colleges, community colleges. My business was buying used textbooks ...”

“... the region.Morocco’s defeat of the Songhay empire is often portrayed as an attack on Islam. An anonymous contemporary writer said the Moroccans were ‘barbarous invaders’ and ‘bloodthirsty criminals’ who had no feeling for ‘the community of faith’. Sultan Ahmad Al Mansur, who ordered the expedition from his seat in Marrakesh, was said to rejoice ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”