“... were originally contributions to similar dialogues, which answer or parody poems by friends or anonymous fellow labourers. When such poems are printed as The Poems of —, or even with more of a recognition of incompleteness as in Suckling’s The Golden Fragments of —, the effect is often that of hearing a mono remastering of a stereo ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... encounters a ghostly, red-eyed, half-flayed steer. The book has as its epigraph the words of an anonymous rancher. ‘Reality’s never been of much use out here,’ he observes, while Proulx herself notes that ‘the elements of unreality, the fantastic and improbable, colour all of these stories as they colour real life. In Wyoming not the least fantastic ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... here – the Lindisfarne Gospels; ‘No surviving manuscript’ from Whitby, where an anonymous monk wrote the first life of Gregory the Great; nothing from Breedon-on-the-Hill in Leicestershire. Was all this the fault of the Vikings, as King Alfred seems to say in his preface to ‘Pastoral Care’? He recalls seeing ‘how the churches ...”

“... meant a great deal to me then, especially in connection with the transition I was making, from the anonymous itinerant at University College London to the aspiring writer with secret ambitions. It was in Bandra, too, that I discovered, as did my parents, the desire to return to the city proper in which I’d grown up and which I’d always wanted to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... still lived in cellars. ‘If Manchester in our era has a uniform,’ Haslam writes, ‘it’s the anonymous lad, hooded and hidden from the watchful gaze of CCTV.’ If Manchester music has a legendary sound, it is the empty-factory echo of Joy Division.The book spends less time on the city’s happier recent exports – trophy-winning football stars and ...”

“... 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 ...”