“... suddenly and mysteriously in January 1993. His widow received letters suggesting murder. Some were anonymous, two were not. One was from a servant at Prime Minister’s House. He named senior government officials who, he alleged, had told him to put poison in the food served to the general. It was widely rumoured that Sharif (then the prime minister) had had ...”

“... star-struck at the sight of Hemingway across the street, surrounded and at the same time left anonymous by a ‘youthful torrent’ of students from the Sorbonne. I didn’t know whether to ask him for an interview or cross the avenue to express my unqualified admiration for him. But with either proposition, I faced the same great inconvenience. At the ...”

“... has got hold of them) by William Cowper, Byron, the sailor-satirist Edward Thompson, and the anonymous author of a splendid poem called ‘The Stage Coach’, much anthologised in the Georgian period. A few lines are quoted from each of these writers, and every single quotation contains one or more obvious errors – often, it seems, the result of ...”

“... belief. The theory of evolution was not new in 1858. Its most sensational exposition had been the anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which appeared in 1844 and was the work of the Scottish journalist and publisher Robert Chambers. It outsold Dickens, was parodied by Disraeli in Tancred, and Prince Albert read it aloud every afternoon to ...”

“... which seemed to suit Jansson. But their affair caused a scandal and prompted the first of the many anonymous phone calls she would receive, chiding her for her sex life or for selling out by drawing cartoons. Her father was furious about the affair, mainly because he disapproved of Wirtanen’s politics. Jansson was defiant. ‘I don’t want, and never will ...”

“... interplay between the tronie and the portrait – between the allusive characterisation of an anonymous model and the presentation of a known subject with a set of attributes recognisable within a defined social field. There is a basic politics to this, of course: if we want to state it as an economic probability, it comes down to the difference between ...”

“... the basis for Chaucer’s own collection of women’s lives, The Legend of Good Women. The anonymous Old English elegies – The Wanderer and The Wife’s Lament being the most famous – were meditations on loss and trauma that made effective use of repetition. But ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ is informed most of all by the tradition of ...”

“... or less whom you are writing or painting for, whereas in the marketplace your audience becomes anonymous. The world no longer owes the cultural worker a living. Ironically, however, it’s the integration of art into the market that gives it a degree of freedom. Once it’s primarily a commodity, culture becomes autonomous. Deprived of its traditional ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... rides into a small town and upends it. The protagonist of War and War (1999) is obsessed with an anonymous medieval manuscript of an epic poem found in the archives of his town. Last year saw the publication in Hungary of the as yet untranslated Zsömle Odavan (‘Zsömle is Waiting’), about surreal goings-on in an unnamed village. Two of the novels have ...”

“... of St Gall, in Switzerland, is a poem that offers helpful advice. ‘Oh man, think long,’ the anonymous poet urges, ‘before talk escapes your mouth.’ If you want to be successful, you need to learn to ‘speak thoughtfully, without anger and hatred … Listening quickly and answering slowly.’ Know what to say and when to listen, or you risk ...”

“... thematic here: no battle sites, no city plans, no population movements. But equally there are no anonymous excavation sites, no find-spots, no sea routes or shipwrecks. It is as though having made the effort, not only to plot the physical geography but to reconstruct it as it was over two millennia ago (a far harder task), the researchers simply gave up on ...”

“... and so on, whether talented or untalented, are as ‘sincere’ and ‘authentic’ as those anonymous metalworkers, believing in what they do, committed to their craft, encouraged and confirmed by public and critical favour – sometimes even by disfavour. Of course there are always a few charlatans and cynics and posers around, especially near the ...”

“... Jubilee taking a four-hour bain de foule in the streets of Central London delighting to be an anonymous celebrant.Rosebery was fascinated by the techniques he had seen in operation at the American Democratic Convention of 1873, and borrowed many of them when he persuaded Gladstone to stand for Midlothian and organised his campaign – for example, the ...”

“... Under a flat, anonymous title and in serial guise one of the most exotic – even flamboyant – intellectual projects of recent years is coming to fruition. The first volume of W.G. Runciman’s Treatise on Social Theory, devoted to the dry topic of methodology, set out in reasonable and moderate tones an agenda for social understanding combining – in so many words – ambitions of a Ranke, a Comte, a Proust and a Hart: to report accurately, to explain scientifically, to re-create imaginatively, and to judge impartially and benevolently ...”