“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that this information is the necessary price we pay for Internet commerce. Society has become more anonymous, more fluid, more mobile, and it is information which makes much of modern civic life possible. Too much is made of technology: the all-seeing camera, the omnipotent Internet. Methods of surveillance have become more pervasive, but so have modes of ...”

“... one think of some American Babylon of the future.’ A common trope was the city-as-desert (an anonymous publication of 1868 bore the title Paris désert: Lamentation d’un Jérémie haussmannisé), and one of the signature images of Impressionist painting was the view from a window over a deserted street or place. The conservative Louis Veuillot wrote ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... wasn’t at all negligible even in the 16th century – as shown by the Tarih-i Hind-i Garbi, an anonymous Turkish text. Two centuries before al-Baghdádi, we have the account of Ilyas al-Mawsuli’s travels to Spanish America, of which not one but two recent translations into English exist. We ignore these works, and take Bernard Lewis as our guide, at our ...”

“... as to one in a dream from which it might be dangerous to be woken too suddenly. In the words of an anonymous writer, quoted in Greil Marcus’s morning-after ‘Real Life Rock Top Ten’ column: ‘Nothing more American than the faith that chickens will always go somewhere else to roost.’ Above all, we were warned – at least if you measure by my inbox ...”

“... and Lamarck, and paid tribute to the bestselling Vestiges of Creation, published in 1844, whose anonymous author ‘argues with much force on general grounds that species are not immutable’. As for the ‘principle of natural selection’, it had been applied to the human race by W.C. Wells in 1813, and extended to other species by Patrick Matthew in ...”

“... the things that soldiers had seen, and done, were too distressing to recall. Peters cites an anonymous letter from the front, published as a pamphlet in 1643, in which the writer, addressing an unnamed ‘Sir’, has ‘forced’ pen to paper, but ‘can reduce things to nothing but confusion’. He tries again: ‘but you require my most serious ...”

“... tearing from within her’.The crudest, funniest and most effective of the many Toft satires, the anonymous Much Ado about Nothing: or, The Rabbit-Woman’s Confession, ridiculed her illiteracy and promiscuity in an exposé ‘in her own Stile and Spelling’ that promised to get at the truth by ‘touching her in the Tenderest part, viz. her ...”