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“... the first major assault on received ideas about Dutch realism focused on those representations of anonymous figures and commonplace acts that had come to be classified as genre. In the 1960s, an influential group of scholars based in Utrecht began to probe the realistic surface of Dutch painting for symbolic meanings. Inspired by the work of Erwin ...”

“... Marmaduke Marblestone (my favourite, adopted for an epitaph on a Captain Boucher), and an anonymous figure called ‘the Reporter’. The poems and prose narrative are prefaced by exchanges between a fictional editor called G.T., his fictional friend H.W., and a fictional printer called A.B. All of these are almost certainly invented by the poet to ...”

“... for an anchoress’). They were evidently genetic sisters, not spiritual ones. The Wisse’s anonymous author remarks: ‘you are much talked about, what well-bred women you are, sought after by many for your goodness and your generosity, and sisters from one father and one mother, [who] in the bloom of your youth renounced all the joys of the world and ...”

“... demonstration against Cruise missiles that she copied the relevant document and delivered it in an anonymous envelope to the Guardian newspaper. In 1986, if Bernard Ingham’s book is to be believed, during the crisis about the Westland helicopter company, Leon Brittan, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, allowed his head of information, Collette ...”

“... sitting on the rooftops, neatly unhooking the sharp-edged slates and aiming them at the necks of anonymous passers-by ‘until the air was full of their silly heads, flying around as thick as autumn leaves’. For a moment we can almost believe that these presumably innocent adults deserved their decapitation. Rather too predictably perhaps, Sam is the only ...”

“... and these provided some sort of escape from himself, particularly the admirable DA – Depressives Anonymous – for which he and his wife worked in the Seventies. Over and above self-mockery he could certainly be infinitely tiresome, as well as an egregious ass, but that does not affect the remarkable involuntary innerness of his two journal volumes (Part of ...”

“... de Guermantes (4), the Marquis de Sade (5), Jean Cocteau (6), the Vicomte de Noailles (7), an anonymous gym instructor (8), Igor Markevitch (9), Diaghilev (10), Nijinsky (11), Maurice Gendron (12): I was the daughter of 2, an immensely rich Belgian banker, and the granddaughter of 3, who was said to be the model for 4, and was also – would you believe ...”

“... Franks as ‘a swarm of flies’ and as ‘grasshoppers without wings’. As for Christianity, the anonymous 12th-century author of the Sea of Precious Virtues announced that ‘anyone who believes that his God came out of a woman’s privates is quite mad; he should not be spoken to, and he has neither intelligence nor faith.’ In a final chapter, on ‘The ...”

“... to accept that this poetry was of some importance for its age. If we look at the claim of an anonymous poet that ‘one man reads Milton, forty Rochester,’ we are no longer tempted to dismiss it out of hand. We are perhaps more in danger of accepting it without adequate empirical investigation. We also have an advantage over the publishers of, for ...”

“... Years ago, when I was serving as an anonymous hack on the Times Literary Supplement, one of my duties was to pen sprightly paragraphs for a weekly books column. The idea was to mop up publications which were not considered worth full-scale reviews but which nonetheless had to be ‘covered’ by a journal of record such as ours ...”

“... its quotations were chiefly drawn from speeches by politicians who adorned the War Cabinet. The anonymous compiler, who entitled his collection The Complete Grammar of Anarchy, contrasted with some irony the fortunes of the members of the 1913 Ulster Provisional Government with those of the members of its Dublin counterpart three years later. Many of the ...”

“... back-alley enterprise. Here are passages without antecedent or consequence, brief, sometimes anonymous; sometimes gratifying enough, in a casual sort of way. Writing about sex is difficult. It is hard to describe good sex without resorting to cliché, without being coarse, obvious or prurient. Bad sex is easier to write about, but it is not interesting ...”

“... so forthright, so amusing and yet so balanced.’ The reviewer for the Scotsman, traditionally anonymous, was given pride of place: ‘If we all listened to Hudson,’ he said, ‘we would think and write a little better. Some of us might even say what we meant, and be understood.’ What a happy day that would be, here and in Laputa, but if Hudson’s ...”

“... to prevent the crime, he explains the various ways to go about committing it, such as opening an anonymous Austrian Sparbuch – savings book – of which there are estimated to be twenty-six million in existence (Austria, for the record, has a population of just over eight million). It’s also possible, apparently, to buy your own bank. If, on the other ...”

“... public internet. As we walked Cermak’s endless, windowless corridors, with their white walls and anonymous blue doors, we paused (not for too long: Cermak is under continuous video surveillance; lingering looks suspicious) outside Cermak’s ‘Meet-Me Room’, where the crucial cables connect. ‘The backbone of the internet’ goes through Cermak, I was ...”