“... 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 ...”

“... one safely French, one from the marches of Wales (modern Rhuddlan) – but when a work is anonymous, such as the favourite Amadas et Ydoine that circulated widely in French-speaking areas, it is hard to be quite sure of its origins. The French of England was sufficiently different from the French of Paris to be the butt of jokes by the 13th ...”

“... too, suggests a popularising approach. It’s devoted to a head-and-shoulders blow-up of the anonymous Italian lady from a Pompeian fresco, good-looking and auburn-haired, who, pen raised to lips and writing-tablet in hand, has so often, and so improbably, been identified as Sappho. At least since the Victorian period, the favourite visual notion of ...”

“... this they sometimes made references to particular aspects of Islamic faith or practice. The anonymous Selimus, Emperor of the Turks (c.1593) refers to the ‘holy rites of Mahomet,/His wondrous tomb and sacred Alcoran’. In Marlowe’s 1588 play Tamburlaine ends by railing against Mahomet and burning the Alcoran – for which, miraculously, he is ...”

“... the date of his departure from Vienna; a packet of photographs, some with inscriptions, others anonymous; a scrap of paper with the name and address of a woman in Britain, written in someone else’s handwriting. From these scant beginnings, Sands began this riveting odyssey of discovery. The documents led him to people whose memories and personal ...”

“... Tinker Creek, Teaching a Stone to Talk, portions of An American Childhood) the butterfly is not an anonymous member of an order within the class Insecta but a particular creature who, having had the particularly bad luck to have emerged from its chrysalis in a schoolteacher’s glass jar and so lost the chance to unfurl its wings while they were still capable ...”

“... name appears in only one. Her career, in Franklin’s words, ‘presents a fascinating example of anonymous authorship’. So how have scholars come to identify her as the author of this book? The strongest circumstantial evidence Franklin cites – tucked away in a footnote – is a payment by her publisher James Dodsley to ‘G. 20 pounds for Hartly ...”

“... is extraordinary. The editors believe, unexceptionably, ‘that Q1’s copy was based on an anonymous reconstruction of a performance based on the text behind F, that Q2’s copy was largely based on Shakespeare’s foul papers, and that F’s copy was no more than one step away from a manuscript containing some significant authorial revisions to the ...”

“... of sacrosanct, ivory-tower atmosphere too much. The craftsmen who worked on the cathedrals were anonymous . . . I think cheap books, less fuss about our sacred personalities, and more service to the common cause in the fight against Fascism . . . would bring us very much closer to the masses. This is the language of the Popular Front, formed after the US ...”