“... killed the friend. How did the old man die? Who disconnected the artificial lung? Who is the anonymous girl found drowned in the lake? Was the wound on her neck caused by a knife or a fang? This is a philosophical novel, so we mustn’t expect answers to these questions. The old man, before he dies, broods on the end of civilisation, gives us pictures ...”

“... his house was on fire with the curt words that domestic affairs were Mme Budé’s concern, to the anonymous scholars celebrated by Guillaume Postel, who breathed into their inkpots to keep the ink fluid during icy winters, the scholars of Europe had to follow an ascetic regime as they ransacked libraries, stole or copied manuscripts, and printed, translated ...”

“... must be evident to every one who reads this most entertaining biography,’ wrote an anonymous reviewer in 1857, ‘that under an extraordinarily cold and unsympathising exterior, Charlotte Brontë concealed a fiery soul and violent passions.’ Though Gaskell notoriously abetted such concealment by suppressing the evidence of Brontë’s passion ...”

“... identify its translator, and two of Picador’s three reissues of other works by him leave theirs anonymous). Like many of Llosa’s novels, Pantoja looks back to Peru’s military 1950s, and the episode it uses to evoke what Mayta calls ‘that unbelievably complex web of causes and effects, reverberations and accidents that make up human history’ is the ...”

“... and wild sexuality; the notion, often contradicting available evidence, that it is the produce of anonymous craftsmen blindly obeying ancient traditions; the tacit endorsement of its blatant robbery from the people who made it. Reading her book, we realise that the crass pseudo-science of Virey’s book, with its conclusions about the receding forehead of the ...”

“... to bed to ruminate privately on his patients’ experiences. He became fascinated by the notion of anonymous sex and constructed a fanciful theory that it was women who prevented men from realising their need to have sex with unlimited numbers of willing partners. Ideas like these put him at a distance from his wife. He found that he could only share his ...”

“... of artistic progress. While the novelist who called herself ‘George Eliot’ emerged from the anonymous work of translating and reviewing as if from the hack-work chrysalis of the butterfly artist, Oliphant earned her first commission as a reviewer by her early success with fiction; and rather than abandon the more routine labour to concentrate on the art ...”

“... Roman Jakobson, Mark Strand – it is a compounding of Pessoa’s mystery that he has been anonymous for so long in Anglo-American culture. A canon that includes Pessoa seems infinitely less claustrophobic and bossy. There is, Pessoa writes in The Book of Disquietude, ‘no better étude or melody for me than the lightly moonlit moment in which I ...”

“... run up. Whole blocks of small-scale Victorian commercial building were reduced to rubble and anonymous new projects begun. And then the boom was over, and the building stopped, and for years and years there were just the concrete stumps, sprouting their reinforcement rods, and empty half-built frames encroached on by weeds and small bushes. They were ...”

“... Vermeer, that to go very close is to see what you saw before – a smooth, uniform surface, as anonymous as a projection on ground glass. Velázquez’s surface is strikingly various – a lively calligraphy in which each stroke is adapted to its purpose. There are marks for flames, for cheeks, for gleams on armour and sparkles on braid. As you ...”

“... whom the standard accounts list in ‘an academic variant of the epic catalogue’, but in the anonymous dealers and export agents who between them soaked up well over 60 per cent of the edition. And the lady knew exactly what she was up to, as Ezra Pound did when in mid-1921 he advised his parents to invest in a copy as much on financial as on aesthetic ...”

“... Mariani is very good on Crane’s desire, rather than love, for New York; in the city, he could be anonymous and sexually alive. But what he couldn’t do was hold down a job. He wrote advertising copy, but the economic depression of the times conspired with his loathing for the work. So he would sabotage jobs, in order to write, cadge jobs and money from his ...”

“... is that Perón and Eva were figures in ‘a crass mythology’, and that we know nothing about the anonymous persons who played those roles, a performance only marginally less farcical than that of the man with his doll and his box. But a name is always a role for Borges, an idea of the self, and the interplay between actor and part takes many forms in his ...”

“... barbarian. Whether she is glorifying the bathers’ nakedness or celebrating, as elsewhere, the anonymous liberties of the veil, Lady Mary insists on seeing Turkish women as freer than their Western counterparts, and delights in overturning her predecessors’ gloomy emphasis on harem confinement. Her report on the bath ends in a characteristic ...”

“... from the Hydes’ collection held in 1966; and a comparison of catalogues will reveal that the ‘anonymous lender’ of many superb articles in the London display must have been the learned, generous, charming Mrs Hyde. For general use, the most valuable publication serving Johnson during the bicentennial year is certainly Donald Greene’s volume for the ...”