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“... 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 ...”

“... something that has been understood by very few jewellers – is that most jewellery pieces are anonymous, even cold. A rope of Mikimoto pearls or a magnificent strand of diamonds can be given by almost anyone to almost any woman; the significance of the object lies only in its cost. Even rarity is up for grabs: there is much more manufactured rarity than ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... way we have continued to treat them in the thirty generations since. A schoolboy named Dick in the anonymous Elizabethan play July and Julian complains:Men may do what they list, God wot, and so cannot we,For if I laugh my father a wanton calls me,If I be sad, my mother saith I am dumplish and surly …Both my parents and masters handle me so ...”

“... of a protected life at court would have been smart enough to imitate symptoms of idiocy. In the anonymous play Misogonus (c.1571), there is a fool character, Cacurgus, who pretends to be simple-minded in his master’s presence, talking mostly unintelligible nonsense about buttocks, then drops the act once he is alone with the audience. Somer, or a version ...”

“... New South Wales delivered the first of its many counter-blows to the cause of culture. An anonymous telephone call alerted Moses at the ABC that his friend Goossens, abroad studying opera houses, would have his luggage searched at Sydney airport, an unheard-of nosiness in those drug-free days. Moses failed to pass on the warning. Goossens’s bags ...”

“... comic are present here, notably the duality of the weak, drab man and the brilliantly coloured anonymous hero. What Babel adds is the suggestion that the superhero’s heroism has a diabolical element: to become a Red Cavalryman (if not a Scarlet Pimpernel) is to enter into a compact with the devil. Blood must be shed; geese must be sacrificed. In ...”

“... its disintegration the images became despairing. The Grand Concernments of England Ensured, an anonymous pamphlet which appeared in 1659, shows that the image of the Commonwealth as being created from a void was a current one: ‘you have made England, Scotland, Ireland, A Chaos without form and void, and I doubt your Omnipotency will never speak the word ...”