“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that Tindal was known in Oxford for his ‘too great familiarity with his bedmaker’. Another anonymous reader gave a twist to Dryden’s insinuation by noting ‘alias Sh—well’ alongside the words ‘a bad Poet and Fleckno’ in Dryden’s 1680 play The Kind Keeper.Many​ of Williams’s readers have names and faces, some previously known, others ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of village, lineage, clan, tribe; the High Islam of scholars and rulers better expresses a modern, anonymous, mobile mass society. Islamic fundamentalism is not, then, a species of cultural atavism: on the contrary, like nationalism in the West, it is that phase of modernisation in which a High, literate culture becomes pervasive and membership-defining for ...”

“... quite as much a time of incipient revolution as the era in which the action was set. The novel was anonymous, but it opened by naming a more powerfully evocative name than the author’s, that of the dedicatee, William Godwin. Its first critics responded by reading it politically and, as Baldick shows, judged its merits largely according to their opinion of ...”

“... Perhaps he drove Heinrich into a position where he had no choice but to ‘sink down into the anonymous mass of his fellow evil-doers – the storm-troopers’. The problem is compounded by Joachim’s own ambiguous response. His reaction on discovering Heinrich’s Nazi uniform in his flat is to spit all over it. But when Heinrich returns with a Nazi ...”

“... to give Federal bureaucrats and their families a human face, as victims and survivors instead of anonymous pen-pushers, is insipid almost to the point of masochism. If the best the Democrats can do is to ask people to be grateful for all that the state does for them, then they will repeat exactly the condescending errors that cost them the Congress last fall ...”

“... mention was made of black people in the London press. Many had run away from their masters to lead anonymous, fugitive lives. Some died of poverty or went to sea; some were transported to America or, more commonly, Australia. Others had moved to different parts of Britain. The custom of giving Africans garish or geo-specific names like Mungo, Pompey or Black ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 tract is different from Francis Place’s careful devising of headings for his sequence of anonymous handbills on contraception, issued in the same period: ‘To the Married of both Sexes’, ‘To the Married of both Sexes in Genteel Life’, ‘To the Married of both Sexes of the Working People’. One is the effort of a man with a bee in his ...”

“... paid for a third item in Oslo or Monaco to be easily discovered. Private consignors may wish to be anonymous for other reasons: above all, a reluctance to publicise their wealth or their loss of it. There are of course other, less reputable reasons for obscurity. Lacey, it seems, has been listening to the people in marketing: ‘Gucci, Moët, Hermès, Chanel ...”

“... knowing and kill him painlessly at the right moment. The ultimate fantasy here would be that an anonymous state institution would do this for us without our knowledge. Again the question surfaces, however, of whether or not we know that the Other knows. The way to a perfect totalitarian society is open. What is false is the underlying premise: that the ...”