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“... moi, la science c’est nous,’ as the French physiologist Claude Bernard put it. Images of anonymous medieval masons building a cathedral or social insects sacrificing themselves for the good of the hive form a refrain in mid 19th-century writing about the scientific life. Fitzroy compared himself to an ant carrying its mite to the hoard. All the ...”

“... It may be that we are at our most revealing not in our intimacies but when we are at our most anonymous. These, at least, are the areas that Arbus leads us into when she talks and writes about photography. ‘Our whole guise,’ she writes, ‘is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way but there’s a point between what you want ...”

“... successful – attempt to create suspense. There are numerous third-person passages told from the anonymous killer’s point of view, not to mention extensive flashbacks to wartime Russia and Germany. Characters swap identities or have dual personalities, ancient witnesses are tracked down in nursing-homes, and there’s a lot of flamboyantly cinematic ...”

“... and ride out into the country. They stop at a roadside café, where Travis has sex with an anonymous girl, played by Christine Noonan, who is a touchstone for Travis’s fantasy, appearing when he is controlling the script (it’s all very 1960s in a slightly embarrassing, hippy sort of way), a latter-day Marianne, inspiring the overthrow of the old ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Now they are unstoppable. As their popularity has grown, so have the conspiracy theories. An anonymous poster on the message boards at stieglarsson.com asks the all-important question: ‘What if he is pretending to be dead, and rises again, like Lisbeth from a premature burial?’ The three books that have been published were all completed before ...”

“... he collapsed in the street with pneumonia, coughing up blood. Redemption was threefold: Alcoholics Anonymous rid him of his chemical dependency, golf caddying at swanky LA country clubs gave him physical fitness and the milieu for his first novel, and writing it chipped him from the sand trap of failure. Thus far, thus familiar. In an era of literary ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Is this ground-zero ugliness, or does it just tell us in what ways Aesop falls short of the anonymous writer’s requirements for beautiful? Did Aesop have the misfortune to possess a particularly bad combination of negative features; would only the full array of a neat head, large nose, straight back, pallor, tallness, arched feet, long arms, parallel ...”

“... in 1541, which adapts the ottava rima practised by the Italian poets to Yiddish. The other is an anonymous romanzo cavalleresco published in Verona in 1594, Pariz un Viene, ‘the first modern work of Yiddish literature’. Baumgarten makes a strong case for the complexity and modernity of both, seeing them as the unrecognised equals of works by Ariosto and ...”

“... shoes, Deza thinks not. Later he watches video clips of all sorts of people: celebrities and anonymous Joes, people requesting a loan, quarrelling in a hotel room, boozing in a pub. His verdicts are rapid and, he admits, largely a matter of audacity or bluff. He never discovers what use is made of his opinions, which bear on what people have it in them ...”

“... unsigned, but Van der Post wrote a furious letter complaining that his book had been given to an anonymous anthropologist to review. He was a novelist, he pointed out: his book should be treated as a novel. Did the editor propose to invite astronomers to review science fiction? Nevertheless, even in making this protest he had to insist on his expertise ...”