“... 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 ...”

“... like Rossano Brazzi. On the other hand, Gardner’s character is free to have sex with many anonymous and unseen ordinary men, gypsies, servants, men glimpsed infrequently or kept off screen altogether. She pays for this freedom with her life. The film responds to the audience’s basic desire that the star can still be someone whom anyone in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and hasn’t died out yet. In these songs the lovers, the plaintiffs, the protagonists are mostly anonymous; it’s their geography that is named and listed and described with passionate fondness. When people fail, places remain; you can always have recourse to the landscape, and it will never leave you, though you may leave it. Leaving home and returning are ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is French? So it would seem. Yes.At long last music had begun to play. On the dance floor, a dozen anonymous infants lurched to and fro. ‘Ew,’ a groomsman was overheard saying, as one of my nieces stripped down to her nappy – the one who eats avocados through the bag and asked for pasta for Christmas. If you have enough nieces and nephews, you understand ...”

“... that isn’t pedantic’, in various senses. Religious leaders could insist, as one anonymous preacher put it, that ‘larnin’ isn’t religion, and eddication don’t give a man the power of the Spirit.’ In the presidential election contest of 1828 between Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams, a farmer asked which was ‘the best dictionary ...”

“... cancer, invasive operations and contemplated suicide. A late series depicts friends staring out of anonymous tower blocks. He anticipated falling figures. There is a self-portrait, jumping man from 1977, rehearsing an abrupt departure that would never take this showboating form. Structures fail through corrupt politics, horror threatens. The mind grid ...”

“... James. In May, he is entrusted by his mother to the care of a couple of men she met at Alcoholics Anonymous, who undertake to show him the wild beauty of Scotland, and to teach him to fish. If this novel was your only source of information you would assume that AA was a drinking club that for some odd reason didn’t serve drink on the premises, and certainly ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is either unknown or that the speaker doesn’t wish to reveal. An example of the first is: ‘The anonymous witness said ____ had seen a gruesome act.’ An example of the second is: ‘The person, whoever ____ was, had come in so suddenly and with so little noise, that Mr Pickwick had no time to call out, or oppose ____ entrance.’ (Dickens himself ...”