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“... 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 ...”

“... If the Blackwood’s critics relished the freedom of anonymity, Finkelstein’s prose is anonymous in a less happy sense. Its baseline is a pallid marketese (‘resulting financial gains’, ‘period of unprecedented growth’), relieved by the odd pompous sonority (‘planes of textual production’ when he really means ‘genres’). As a ...”

“... disguised as a safety regulation). Newspapers were forced to censor themselves by a law banning anonymous articles. Most writers complied; many grovelled. Price has discovered an embarrassing ode written by Théophile Gautier on the baptism of the Prince-Imperial in 1856: ‘a fair-haired Jesus who holds in his little hand . . . the peace of the world and ...”

“... and they praise Allah when British hostages are beheaded in Iraq.’ But what could transform anonymous bragging into murderous behaviour? Shabbir felt that poverty and alienation might have made the bombers more susceptible to extremist ideology, but his brother disagreed. ‘That’s just an excuse people make for them,’ he said. ‘Those people ...”

“... freely, sometimes clandestinely. His work was sometimes avowed, sometimes attributed, sometimes anonymous. (Over his life, ‘Voltaire’ used more than two hundred other aliases.) His plays were still performed at the Comédie-Française. His epistolary relations with friends, ministers and salonnières were conducted in the firm expectation that his ...”

“... French baccalauréat. The film largely takes the form of an address: ‘He wrote me . . .’ the anonymous narrator keeps repeating, as he quotes from letters a traveller has sent him, describing what he has seen and heard. There are images and sounds from Africa and Japan – the bustle of the city streets, market chatter – but their anthropological ...”

“... spin operation, its astonishing control of the political ‘narrative’ and contempt for what an anonymous aide is said to have termed ‘the reality-based community’. In the meantime, the cast keeps piling up. Vanessa installs a talkative taxi-driver as chief theorist of her newly commercial production regime. Tyrone is accused of attacking a curator ...”

“... refers to the modern Greek language as being the ‘undisputed heir of ancient Greek’, the anonymous scribbler has added: ‘Nonsense. It is the barbarous pidgin of the Albano-Slavs who defile the land of their occupation with the deformity of their “dago” bodies and the squalor of their politics.’ But ideas of continuity also raise more ...”

“... and her uncommon resistance to any sense of either despair or the ridiculous in these endless anonymous copulations. You have to question her assertion that she has never suffered any kind of clumsiness or brutality, and wonder at the absence of unpleasant diseases. Of course, you wouldn’t if it were a fiction: the purely sexual story would be ...”

“... have tracked down many of the literary sources from which this fake was cobbled together by some anonymous cleric. Eco has Baudolino and some fellow students make it up – but perhaps he would say that his is a novel that shows imaginings to be literary even when they are unconscious of being so. There seems to be little agreement on the purpose of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Swift: The Man, His Works and the Age (1962-83), which eventually ran to two thousand pages. An anonymous reviewer of Volume III called it ‘the definitive life of Jonathan Swift … one of the great scholarly achievements of our time’; it was also ‘the best written of modern critical biographies, so that many readers will actually wish this massive ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... their frank erotic passion. Very different is the theatrical but utterly serious commitment of the anonymous woman: ‘in all Latinity, I have found no word that can plainly say how intent is my mind upon you, for with God as my witness, I love you with a sublime and exceptional love. Hence there neither is nor shall be anything or any fate that may separate ...”

“... the emperor Maurice at the end of the sixth century. Dennis also edited and translated a trio of anonymous military treatises, one from the sixth century and two, evidently based on personal experience in the field, from the tenth. The Strategikon presents the tactical case against attrition in battle with a clarity that is as arresting as it is new. It ...”