“... and Buddhist art, the beautiful had value only in so far as it embodied a religious idea which anonymous artists, renouncing any notion of self-expression or reputation, brought to their work through the practice of yoga. The Buddhist stupa or Hindu temple image, then, was designed to recreate for the spectator the same visionary connection with his ...”

“... is another poet whose poems may be put before “virginibus puerisque”,’ an anonymous advice book of 1881 confidently assured its readers, before going on to issue the usual warnings against Richardson and Smollett. For Sarah Stickney Ellis, poetry was particularly suited to women readers because it is removed from ‘the realities of ...”

“... other men’s flowers to pick, Enright has picked his own, under such transparent headings as ‘anonymous patient’, former resident of Singapore, and even, characteristically, ‘MS found in a bottle’. It could be said of many of the moving, funny and disturbing passages in this book that they were, like manuscripts found in a ...”

“... master it (from a distance). The contours kept slipping and blurring; the crowd was faceless and anonymous; it could not be fixed in some Lombrosian classification or in the composite photography machine with which Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, sought to discover once and for all the features of the felon. Everybody, it appeared, might descend in(to) a ...”

“... wish I had listened more attentively to the stories he told about those who, like him, yearned for anonymous sex and its corollary, which was, as he hurried to point out excitedly, dangerous sex. (Certainly, I wasn’t surprised at the nemesis that later overtook a senior politician I met in his company.) A taste for policemen, for uniforms, for ...”

“... was drawn to this message,’ he says ‘coded but not stated in punk, because in a small and anonymous way I lived it out myself. In the fall of 1964, in Berkeley ... I was, day after day, for months, part of the crowd that made up the Free Speech Movement. In that event, which began as a small protest over rules and regulations ... everything was at ...”

“... of self-awareness have an oddly flat quality, as if he was testifying at a meeting of Monsters Anonymous about the dark places his addiction has taken him, without actually being in recovery – fitting in a fair amount of monstrousness, in fact, between meetings. The persona’s self-knowledge and self-ignorance are awkwardly layered in the text, hardly ...”

“... In The Land of Hunger, which appeared in Italian in 1978, he gives us an entire document: an anonymous, probably early 17th-century ‘Will and Testament’ of the embodiment of Carnival. It had not been published before; and it is witty, bawdy, intricately revealing, a delight. For once we do not have to rely on authorial choice so narrow that it feels ...”

“... You Make Your Own Life came out just before the Second World War (the title again has the mildly anonymous flavour of the period) and twenty and thirty years later came further collections – When My Girl Comes Home and The Camberwell Beauty. Collected Short Stories, and More Collected Short Stories, were published both in England and in America in 1982 and ...”

“... for the price of a packet of ten cigarettes, and cruised Hampstead Heath in the early hours for anonymous sex without bothering to mention that he had crabs, who stole fivers from the handbags of his few remaining friends and reckoned they deserved it: did he no longer have a life? That might be one way to understand it. But though the fall of Ossie Clark ...”

“... himself to read one of her books and is so angered by its excellence that he slates it in an anonymous review. So much for the Republic of Letters. Urged on by Prince Lucio, Tempest ‘buys’ and weds Lady Sybil. A grossly lavish wedding feast is laid on by the Prince himself. His gift to the bride, a curiously personal one, is a bejewelled serpent ...”

“... mathematicians of quality that they both of them were, was the celebrated Bourbaki, the group of anonymous French mathematicians who set out in the late Thirties to do a Principia and refound mathematics axiomatically. The Bourbaki’s ongoing activities are described in the Compendium in a sequence that rapidly modulates, comma by comma, from respect into ...”

“... or someone whom historians could safely bring on to lend a name and a human face to the otherwise anonymous working-out of the dialectic. Grace had the name and he also had the face, not least as the grower of the 19th century’s most charismatic beard, which entered cricket history when an Australian fast bowler put a bumper through it (and then, this being ...”

“... of trees stuck here and there on a lawn till it ‘looks like the ten of spades’), satires, and anonymous rhymes were the proper critical instruments to use on the well-fleshed and privileged body of English Palladianism. It has too much of conspicuous consumption about it, too much of borrowed style and sentiment, to win the respect offered even to ...”

“... Wilde and the Aesthetic movement are part of a conspiracy to corrupt ‘our boys’, and its anonymous versifier concludes his prejudicial attack by exclaiming: If such be ‘Artists’, then may Philistines   Arise, plain sturdy Britons as of yore, And sweep them off and purge away the signs   That England e’er such noxious offspring bore!* This ...”