“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... roles of temporal and spiritual leader, king and priest – ‘two powers in one body’, as an anonymous 17th-century writer once put it. As a temporal ruler Alexander VII controlled only a mini-state with about a million inhabitants, about a twentieth of the size of the France of Louis XIV. There was a Papal Army – commanded by Alexander’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the fantasies of flight of Francis Godwin, Cyrano de Bergerac, the amazing John Wilkins and the anonymous Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1750), on whose descriptions of a flying people encountered by a shipwrecked sailor near the South Pole Warner dwells with particular relish. She shows us how Voltaire, while indulging himself in satirical mockery ...”

“... wasn’t really a woman.In the 1990s, Turkle imagined the internet as a free, fluid place, an anonymous, impermanent adventure playground that anyone could dip into and out of. Virtualness could be ‘the raft, the ladder, the transitional space, the moratorium, that is discarded after reaching greater freedom’. In 2009, Kevin Kelly, the first editor of ...”

“... proved something of an enigma. The Irish-born Sterne was intrigued by the way in which uniform, anonymous black marks on a page could incarnate the living word. He was aware of the way the linear nature of both print and narrative flatten out the simultaneity of experience. Joyce himself was struck by print’s meagreness, the way one could conjure an ...”

“... Constant Lambert laments the ‘painfully good taste’ of the Piano Concerto in G. The anonymous music critic of the Times (probably H.C. Colles) provides a complete portrait in October 1923: ‘M. Ravel’s charm is something elfish and inscrutable … he conducts with a wrist as steady and supple and with as much economy of unnecessary emotions ...”

“... to see how they got there: The Mezzanine – Howie’s footnote-strewn account of a morning at his anonymous corporate workplace, defamiliarised by intricate descriptions of vending machines and shoelaces – looks a bit like an Americanised nouveau roman and puts Baker somewhere on a line of descent between Donald Barthelme, with whom he briefly studied, and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... TLS and simultaneously tilted at it. Note how, in the review of Benson’s memoir, she uses the anonymous ‘one’ and ‘us’ to mock its universality. She surely knew that her prose had to sign itself. Her essays, both in texture and content, were self-advertisements. She was pushing a project: her own kind of novel. She argued against the ...”

“... ever since editing the TLS (and is currently plotting to ‘out’ all those past generations of anonymous reviewers), clearly takes a perverse pleasure in Green’s end. Now you see him, and now you don’t. Romancing is a hidden polemic on behalf of the much maligned craft of literary biography. Like his subject, though, Treglown can’t quite bring ...”