“... true of anything a bit perverse either in fiction or real life. Why would Natalie go in for weird anonymous internet sex rather than, say, sleeping with some neighbour’s husband, like they did in the old days? ‘You’re difficult to understand,’ Leah tells Natalie. ‘You have your work. You have Frank. You’ve got all these friends. You’re getting ...”

“... individuals who loom briefly into view before being hacked down, or poisoned, or incinerated, are anonymous, or generically named, as though they were cards shuffled and dealt from some unnumberable deck: ‘Bronzebeard’, ‘the king’, ‘the lady’, ‘the French brothers’, ‘the blond one’, ‘the forked nose’. What’s more, Nostradamus seems ...”

“... warrants, though the likelihood is that discretion prevailed. Franklin attributes to Jones the anonymous Discourse on the Impressing of Mariners (1778), but on weak grounds. The Discourse includes an anecdote about the author being sent by his father to help a family servant abducted by the press gang, but even the precocious Jones could not have done this ...”

“... from communal remembrance. By rendering ‘entire cemeteries … mute, indecipherable and anonymous’, this desecration marked a violent reformation of the ‘felt relations with the past’ that had been central to late medieval culture. Like the abolition of chantry chapels, where perpetual masses had been sung for the souls of the departed, this ...”

“... which Baines and Rogers ‘have not been able to identify’, surely means Homer Defended, an anonymous critique of Pope’s Iliad translation that Curll advertised in 1716). In his preface to The Case of Seduction: Being, An Account of the Late Proceedings . . . against the Reverend Abbée, Claudius Nicholas des Rues, for Committing Rapes upon 133 ...”

“... own account of the subject, regardless of its immediate pertinence. Had he recently acted in the anonymous The True Chronicle History of King Leir and his three daughters, Gonorill, Ragan, and Cordella, and found himself unable to get its initial dramatic situation out of his head? Had his attention strayed from the section of Holinshed’s Chronicles he was ...”

“... His new book, produced in less than twelve months, clearly demanded less legwork. The in every way anonymous narrator of The Ghost – he has no name, and not much of a life – has been hired to write the autobiography of Britain’s recently retired former prime minister. The secretarial sidekick to the powerful, from Tiro to Bernard Ingham, is a role Harris ...”

“... an architectural jumble of slatted wood, rough concrete, padlocked steel doors; then climbed past anonymous compounds ringed with razor wire, around dirt bends where derelict-looking houses loomed above the road on iron stilts. By the time I reached my hotel, six hours after landing, the 18th century seemed more remote than ever. To the Portuguese who first ...”

“... in 1952 – is an obvious template. But for an exercise in ‘cultural scab-picking’, as one anonymous fan has called it on the internet, Gojira seems peculiarly concerned to invest its star attraction with pathos. In the eerie final sequence, in which Godzilla and his antagonist perish at the bottom of Tokyo Bay, it’s not easy to tell who we’re ...”

“... make an anthology of the work of drunken helots or Heliots, if he could find enough of them.) One anonymous writer, here rescued from oblivion, divined that Eliot’s aim was ‘to pull the leg’ of the ‘sober reviewer’. The New Statesman thought ‘Prufrock’ was ‘unrecognisable as poetry’ but ‘decidedly amusing’, adding that ‘it is only fair ...”

“... indictment of Jews throughout history and a warning against tolerating them in the future. Another anonymous English account, The Devils of Delphi, appeared early in the 18th century. Its main purpose was to condemn a Christian millenarian group very active in England at that time, the French Prophets, though Sabbatai, once again, was the most prominent of the ...”

“... can match up a buyer and a seller they take a fraction of the deal as commission. Everything is anonymous until the moment the two banks agree a price. Brokers use all sorts of tricks to coax banks into trading. They may hint that a bank out there is willing to trade at attractive levels if only someone will show a reasonable price. They may even fake bids ...”

“... is silent on this. Similarly, when Eleanor first ran for Parliament in East Toxteth in 1922, an anonymous Tory leaflet wreaked havoc with its claim that her demand for family allowances amounted to a tax on single men to support other men’s large families: Pedersen doesn’t seem to realise that in Liverpool this would be understood to mean ‘large ...”

“... self-governing, under such a bewildering variety of charters and concessions that, as one anonymous settler in Virginia complained in the early 18th century, ‘no one can tell what is law and what is not in the plantations.’ Behind the Spanish monarch, scrutinising the activities of Crown and colonists alike, and frequently serving as a check on ...”

“... for the sake of future historians, that notes have been preserved of the identities of the many anonymous ‘friends’, ‘strategists’, ‘fund-raisers’, ‘confidantes’ and (doubtless) envious rivals and bitter enemies to whom both books are indebted. Yet while their source material makes it hard at times to gauge the reliability of their ...”