“... 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 ...”

“... the desolate waves, he stood, Full of high thoughts, and gazed into the distance. The monumental anonymous ‘he’ suggests both heroic stature and a sinister impassiveness. Pushkin had named Peter in early drafts, but here he foreshadows a kinship with another punitive statue, that of the Commendatore of the Don Juan story (often known by his rank rather ...”

“... Penelope); to some I gave names of my own (Princess Anne, the Asian Flu); most of them remained as anonymous to me as I was to them. At all times I was conscious of being the object of their professional concern, and, occasionally, of something stranger, their professional tenderness. Only at the rarest moments, however, was any sense of my individuality ...”

“... diluted, adds sparkle and freshness to a little book which deserves to be more widely known, the anonymous Disciple de Pantagruel. There is not a great deal of ordinary, unpretentious everyday reading from the 1540s or 1550s which is available to be read today. This edition by Professor Demerson and Dr Lauvergnat-Gagnière – a model of discreet and exact ...”

“... and craftsmanlike, and as useful for the future, as it possibly could be. Most of the book’s anonymous stories speak to the third charge. Every few pages some Justice is at work flattering another Justice in hopes of winning more influence within the Court, or trimming some opinion he is drafting in order to persuade some other Justice to join his ...”

“... when someone can be got to say it (even though in the large majority of cases these sources remain anonymous). The strength of this technique is to be found in the large number of interesting nuggets of information he offers about, for example, the complex in-fighting within the Washington defence and intelligence bureaucracies. A lot of this information could ...”

“... from specific institutions to the collectivity. Macaulay, says Burrow, did not understand the anonymous. His successors did, and understood as well that the happy Whig story of progress could not be limited to the triumph of the Reform Bill of 1832. With the idea of nation went an emphasis, implicit all along, on the special, nearly divinely-ordained ...”

“... them to work against gravity. All these horrors Mitford blames on men. And she is not alone. An anonymous hand, she reports, has added to the index of Williams Obstetrics (1980) the following entry: ‘Chauvinism, male, voluminous amounts, pages 1-1102.’ If gravid women have suffered at the hands of medical science, midwives have fared even worse. ‘All ...”

“... maintained across frontiers. One of the revelations of the Gulf War was the existence of a massive anonymous labour force in the region, drawn from all over the Middle East and Asia. Ghosh provides personalities for a few of these workers, village friends who abruptly leave home for Baghdad. We see the logic of their departures and returns, their stunning ...”

“... for example. This would make deconstruction, rather attractively, into a kind of Alcoholics Anonymous for repentant romantics (take it one text at a time). At the end we are invited to attain a position of ‘Bewildered Enlightenment’. No, it’s ‘Enlightened Beguilement’. But the idea is roughly speaking the same: we are to be in love with ...”