“... an exploration of ‘erotic pleasure’ aimed both at ‘prosperous men’ and ‘marginal or anonymous women’. ‘Linda Nochlin and Daisy’ by Alice Neel (1973)  Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Seth K. Sweetser Fund / Bridgeman Images An essay from 2002 about the realist portraiture of Alice Neel provides Nochlin with an opportunity to reflect on ...”

“... and analyses are sound, and whether the evidence backs up the authors’ claims. Their (most often anonymous) reports assess the work’s validity and importance, suggest how it might be improved, and recommend rejection or acceptance, usually with required revisions. Reviewers are increasingly difficult to find, since they are generally not paid or otherwise ...”

“... a noisy crowd circa 1609 was to invoke an audience for Pericles: describing a packed inn, the anonymous author of the pamphlet Pimlyco or Runne Red-cap is ‘Amazde … to see a Crowd/… stretch out so lowd …/So that I truly thought all These/Came to see Shore [Thomas Heywood’s Edward IV] or Pericles.’ On the page, as well as the stage, Pericles ...”

“... a similar compass. The casual ubiquity and overwhelming force of death is registered in the great anonymous waves of souls waiting on the wrong side of the waters of hell (‘There they stood, those souls,/Begging to be the first allowed across, stretching out/Arms that hankered towards the farther shore’). Death is reimagined as a release in the athletic ...”

“... the general. Just another day in the war against Corbyn. The Sunday Times had previously run an anonymous interview with ‘a senior serving general’. ‘Feelings are running very high within the armed forces,’ the general was quoted as saying, about the very idea of a Corbyn government. ‘You would see … generals directly and publicly challenging ...”

“... Y in New York City to the lone chair behind a book-signing table, while a line of hundreds of anonymous readers – each with her own personal Zadie Smith experience to recount during the moment she held the author’s attention – filled the room and stretched beyond where the eye could follow. As with Bieber’s fans, the highlight of each ...”

“... goes like this: She opens a blank document and starts to type. She invents quotes from high-up anonymous sources: ‘a figure close to the government’, ‘a well-placed observer who asked to remain nameless’. She comes up with a nice hook, adds a dash of humour to distract any readers who were expecting the article to provide some information. She ...”

“... from The Execution, placed this time on the left, their target no longer a hapless Habsburg but an anonymous Communard backed up against another wall of cobbles: the sweep of his arm, magnificently and impossibly extended – he is bravely waving his hat – marks a separation between him and his killers, a sort of rupture that Manet created by leaving the ...”

“... I was worried someone might issue a fatwa. He was unconcerned. ‘All the humans in my work are anonymous. They have no identity. What could be the content of such a fatwa? That I’m blaspheming against a particular penis? I don’t think any mullah anywhere is going to self-identify to such an extent. And what you don’t know is that more than a few ...”

“... but not generally hostile. It was 15 years since Robert Chambers had caused a sensation with the anonymous publication of his Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Prince Albert read it aloud to Queen Victoria, and in his novel Tancred, where it features as The Revelations of Chaos, Disraeli parodied both Vestiges and the craze it started. Lady ...”

“... venereal infection used the connection to present protected sex as more heroic than unarmoured. An anonymous mock-epic of 1744, The Machine, or Love’s Preservative (‘In Imitation of Homer and Virgil, and Dryden and Pope’), took the colonel as its hero: ‘In cundum’s Praise/I sing.’ The poem attacks those stupid enough to venture ‘all unarm’d to ...”

“... that Richardson’s creation was unprecedented. Many disliked it for just this reason. As the anonymous work’s authorship became known, the fact that he was a 51-year-old printer, a businessman with no literary track record, emphasised the sense of Pamela as a book that came from nowhere. In a rush it became ...”

“... American attitudes and policies finally rested. This shattering blow was delivered by a handful of anonymous agents hidden in the wider population, working as part of a tightly-knit secret international conspiracy inspired by a fanatical and (to the West) deeply ‘alien’ and ‘exotic’ religious ideology. Its members are ruthless; they have remarkable ...”

“... to blur the traditional boundary between high and low culture. In 1817 J.G. Lockhart wrote an anonymous article in Blackwood’s attacking what he called ‘The Cockney School of Poetry’, the main targets of which were Hazlitt, Keats and, above all, Leigh Hunt. Lockhart was using the term ‘Cockney’ in a slightly different sense from the one we’re ...”

“... philosophical conversations, then borrowed the manuscript and arranged for it to be printed as an anonymous book. Mendelssohn was astonished to find that he had been tricked into becoming a published author, but in the event he was grateful. His work was respectfully received: critical opinion was divided over his attacks on the ‘well-bred ignorance’ of ...”