“... inter alia – the wardress entrusted with the care of Thackeray’s mad wife for fifty years, anonymous waiters who served him, engravers who processed his illustrations and, to wrap things up, a ‘lost entry’ in George Eliot’s journal, recording ‘Mr Thackeray’s passing’. This last was clearly inspired by Peter Ackroyd’s imaginary ...”

“... was enough, no one seriously tried to stop him (if anything, the reverse). He went to Alcoholics Anonymous (he was taken to his second meeting by Paul Merson), and it seems that he still goes. AA could not have asked for better advertising than this book. He also turned to self-help books. To overcome his anxieties, he read Susan Jeffers’s Feel the Fear ...”

“... parade, including the accordionist Sis Cunningham’s down-home denunciation of the HUAC and an anonymous boogie-woogie blast at the anti-labour Taft-Hartley Bill. The female trio known as the Berries apply their Andrews Sisters’ harmonies to a parody version of ‘Swingin’ on a Star’, entitled ‘Swingin’ on a Scab’; the calypsonian Lord Invader ...”

“... the conscious invention of Great Men, or as unthinking behavioural changes occurring in countless anonymous souls. Such variants may be entirely new or combinations of existing practices; the analogy is with genetic mutation and recombination respectively. Their transmission, the analogue of Mendelian inheritance, is equally diverse. Some may be transmitted ...”

“... some casual social meeting. Other incidents, and even quotations, are ascribed to pseudonymous or anonymous friends, or even to no one at all. It is fair to say that Diane Arbus is severely – perhaps fatally – hampered by the unwillingness to co-operate of a number of people of crucial significance to the life: of Arbus’s ex-husband and of Marvin ...”

“... return stirs up the ghosts which are lurking unappeased behind the names on plaques and the anonymous relics in glass cases. An English novelist probing the ancestral relationship of France and Germany puts himself in an awkward position, somewhere between agent-provocateur and bomb-disposal expert. Hughes handles the responsibilities of his undertaking ...”

“... trends. People ought to be helped to overcome them. Perhaps one could found a Hermeneutics Anonymous to give them strength to do so. Society is not a language. Language isn’t a language either, if it comes to that. Virtually nothing is a ‘language’ in the structuraliste sense, except perhaps systems such as packs of playing cards. In a real ...”

“... identifying with the land and the countryside, and characterised by traditional values, anonymous craftsmanship and oak furniture. While the social house had an affinity with Harrods (or Selfridges), the romantic house was closer to Liberty’s (or Laura Ashley). Whatever their differences in style and purpose, both types of house were exercises not ...”

“... preparation of the ground. In their poems Hardy and Larkin are natural dramatists. They intensify anonymous moods, invent situations; only the settings and the noticings are immediately and personally ‘true’. With Betjeman it is different. Although his imagination is so Victorian, he does entirely without the odd Victorian gift for disingenuousness, for ...”

“... mentioned in a poem): the account is presented as that of a celebrated writer who wishes to remain anonymous, a ‘shy and quiet man’, as he calls himself, ‘who had always tried to shun the public eye’. It is really strange that such a fellow should initially have intended to publish the account, with all that it contains of the normally or Edwardianly ...”

“... the status of the nude photograph. Until then, it had been of the essence of the nude that it be anonymous: prints were given titles like ‘Two Sisters’, ‘Fille de Joie’, or, irreducibly, ‘Femme’. Such impersonality was the rule for all three genres of nude photography that were established in the 19th century: the openly erotic (often sold as ...”

“... the present time to establish a Professorship in Heredity and Variation.’ The following year an anonymous benefactor offered to fund a Professorship of Biology for five years, and the University accepted, the subject to be Genetics. Bateson was elected, and held it until he went to direct the John Innes Horticultural Institution in 1910 (before the five ...”

“... to events also contained tips on everything from what to wear when to meetings for Alcoholics Anonymous. The $560 reunion charge was not cheap but there were no other charges, no need to buy even a drink or an icecream, and the charge covered wives, partners and children, all of us to be housed in student rooms. The reunion programme offered five full ...”

“... Towards 2000 doesn’t attack anyone by name, but it disposes its entire discourse by setting up anonymous forces in full fighting kit. The fact that the forces are invariably abstract doesn’t alter the fact that Williams’s setting them up for combat is itself an act of violence. I’m reminded of an essay in which Emmanuel Levinas says that Hegel’s ...”

“... is a familiar enough assertion, and we come across another version of it in The English World. The anonymous scribe writes there: ‘In the Middle Ages England shared with the rest of Europe a rigidly stratified social system. Beneath the king and his nobles was a class of landowning squires living on estates worked by peasants. Slightly outside the system ...”