“... imaginary enemies and, to his cost, singled out Auberon Waugh, thinking him to be the author of anonymous hostile articles in the Spectator. Waugh had hardly written about Goldsmith, but now he went to town in his inimitable way: ‘I have never met the fellow, as I say, and know practically nothing about him. But I have seen his photograph in the ...”

“... can best help us to understand that it is what Chaucer and Langland have in common with the anonymous art of the Middle Ages, not what sets them apart, that is the source of their ...”

“... associated with the name? Trajan’s reply, though it warns against unprovoked persecution and anonymous denunciation, makes it clear: the name was criminal enough. Pliny stands as first witness in Robert Wilken’s The Christians as the Romans saw them, a relaxed survey of some familiar texts and their backgrounds. The exposition is clear and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... decently private; but the phraseology directly alludes to the tradition and practice of Alcoholics Anonymous. Angels strikingly resembles the freewheeling, good-natured narratives which AA irreverently calls ‘drunkalogues’. In them, members publicly recall their previous lives, and how they were all screwed up by drinking. Former drunks (which Denis ...”

“... them a meaning at all. Its subject rather is the positive absence of meaning in the disconnected, anonymous features of modern German life – blocks of flats, café conversations, the loud noise that may or may not be a terrorist bomb. The may or may-not principle is carried far into the actual method of the novel. We know that Ulrich Hargenau, a ...”

“... entails the sacrifice of the writer’s empirical and ‘complacent’ I: it is essentially anonymous. It is not, as with Proust, that the I which writes is another, profounder self than the I which only lives, but that the writer somehow transcends or eludes selfhood by yielding up his poor Ego to language in its pure state. Language is the one form of ...”

“... of love, so that to be beyond the reach of reconciliation and blood-fellowship is to remain anonymous. Quinx takes in a grand celebration of blood-fellowship in the form of the first post-war gypsy festival at Les Saintes Maries de la Mer in the Camargue. Durrell gives no hint that those who gather there must be the lucky survivors of persecution and ...”

“... than allegations which run in tandem with received opinion. Chris Mullin claims too much for his anonymous bombers. He would have been better advised to claim less, and to fasten on the fact that one of his informers told him the codeword used by the bombers when, too late, they phoned in a warning. No one except the Police and the man who took the call know ...”

“... of a car and of its occupant seen near the farm at the relevant time. He had also been named in an anonymous telephone call. Yew Tree Farm had been burgled for its antiques. And, through his children, Spencer knew Carl Bridgewater. What happened instead was classic. The various pieces of evidence about Spencer were never properly assembled. A colleague at work ...”

“... like a collection of much shorter polemics.) Moreover, this pamphleteer and polemicist was never anonymous. Greer has always been in the business of constructing an image of herself, her very point being to make outrageous and idiosyncratic statements. Only the pre-1968 journalism might have shown us what it was possible for her to do when she wasn’t a ...”

“... you allow me this indulgence.’ ‘You’, here, being ‘Madame’, the letter’s otherwise anonymous addressee. The writer is keen to flatter her literary taste and philosophical curiosity. He allows us to think he might know her rather well, slipping in asides about times spent together and memories of intimate sensation. He allows us, Tunstall ...”

“... the change in preposition a discreet sign of her death. But maybe that’s overinterpreting. The anonymous protagonist of ‘Marriage Lines’, recently widowed, goes on holiday to Barra, where he and his wife went every summer for more than two decades, since the year before they were married. The holiday was presumably booked when she was still ...”

“... who is gravely ill. As they sit together, a servant delivers a letter to Françoise. It is anonymous. It begins: ‘Madame, I have loved you for a long time but I can neither tell you nor not tell you. Forgive me.’ It ends: ‘You are so nice, take pity on me, I am dying because I cannot have you.’ Françoise thinks she will show the letter to her ...”

“... that goes with them. David Foster Wallace, whose fiction drew on his experience in Alcoholics Anonymous, was outed as a reader of self-help after his death. George Saunders has called fiction ‘a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth’. Both writers delivered college commencement addresses that were then marketed as ...”