“... the idea of starting up a ‘true crimes’ magazine). Although most of these early writings were anonymous, his biographer has Ross, in his early twenties, writing for ‘perhaps two dozen’ different papers. On one occasion during those hobo years, Ross went looking for a New York job but was rebuffed. We don’t need a biographer to tell us that this ...”

“... because too many media people knew that he was right: it was via television, after all, that the anonymous, un-Presidential, warning had been relayed, along with very specific information on Iraqi preparations to cross the 36th parallel. Having decided to attack Iraq, he had to decide how to do it, and there, electoral considerations were not merely ...”

“... about it: nonetheless every year since 1990, in Yugoslavia as was or is, has brought its often anonymous and as often repressed calls for peace and reconciliation, demonstrating that very large numbers of ‘ordinary people’ have been anything but swept away by ‘ethnic’ or other opportunist gambles. Nothing may be as instructive, in this story, as ...”

“... and exorcisms for clues about how to make poems. What he is after are the eyes and ears of the anonymous folk poet who could hear flowers growing, the hen laying its eggs, the stars multiplying, and the Earth and the Sun speaking with a human voice. ‘Father’s scythe lies across mother’s Sunday skirt’ is how the Serbian riddle describes the crescent ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... always be counted on for an upset or a stunning doubles match. Today the middle-level players are anonymous, earnest technicians who play the satellites and occasionally rise to prominence with scarcely a ripple or memory left after their time is over. Some account of the organic nature of tennis is missing from Caryl Phillips’s rather too random ...”

“... judges, but they were not necessarily without fault themselves: a point made forcibly by another anonymous poet who took his side. Even the best books have their limitations, and Herrup seems strikingly uninterested in literature, despite the opportunity her case presents to combine the techniques of microhistory and new historicism. She has little to say ...”

“... any poetry was ANY GOOD. It was exciting for such deeply bookish types to call, say, Beowulf an ‘anonymous, crass, purblind, infantile, featureless HEAP OF GANGRENED ELEPHANT’s SPUTUM’ or to come up with obscene parodies not just of works they hated, such as John Pudney’s revered war anthem, ‘Johnny Head-in-Air’: Wail not the luck of Johnny ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the piece is tightly wrought, taking the medieval chanson as its unexpected literary model. The anonymous speaker’s words have an emblematic courtliness that corresponds to the heraldic scars, the result of wounds sustained underground, which emblazon his body. They strike the note for what follows: the translation of personal experience into motifs which ...”

“... 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 ...”