“... 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 ...”

“... the scene is taken from a news article, where the line is not attributed to Cheney but to an anonymous staffer, and spoken about Bush, not directly to him.) And there is one glimpse at how adept Cheney was at pushing Bush’s macho buttons: Dick Cheney was concerned about the slow diplomatic process. He warned that Saddam Hussein could be using the time ...”

“... nice joke, because Penrith-Smith combines both an English place-name, and the most anonymous, least curious surname in English) has told Jacques that he is not called Dafydd Elias but Jacques Austerlitz. Jacques asks, with the enforced politeness of the English schoolboy, ‘Excuse me, sir, but what does it mean?’ To which Mr Penrith-Smith ...”

“... Autobiography of a Super-Tramp. Bored, middle-aged, and dissatisfied with his posh friends, the anonymous narrator decides it’s time to marry and, after his first two proposals are turned down, resolves ‘to trouble no more about respectable women, but to find a wife in the common streets’. Emma, the pretty young woman he meets one night by a bus stop ...”

“... Nip/Tuck, about Miami plastic surgeons. The role of her mother was played by Vanessa Redgrave. In Anonymous (2011), a conspiracy theory film based on the notion that Shakespeare was really the Earl of Oxford, Joely plays the young Elizabeth I and Vanessa plays the old version. Later this year, Joely’s 21-year-old daughter Daisy Bevan will appear in her ...”

“... agreed that a famous person revealing their own clinical despair could only be helpful to the anonymous millions struggling in silence with the stigma of mental illness. Fry was applauded in the columns, on TV and on the front pages, called courageous and thanked for speaking out and bringing great benefit to those suffering from misunderstood mood ...”

“... deliberately killed without trial by their own government did not arise again until 2010, when an anonymous US official told the Washington Post that Anwar al-Awlaki, a US-born Muslim cleric and online celebrity among Islamic radicals, was on a kill list. ‘He’s working actively to kill Americans,’ the official said, ‘so it’s both lawful and sensible ...”

“... dipped in acid; things fell off, skin was removed.’ And through it all, Clay keeps getting anonymous text messages from whoever is watching him. You could be forgiven for thinking that all this will eventually add up to something. Clay certainly thinks it should. A lot of the second half of this book consists of him trying to get people to tell him ...”

“... Mary Shelley.’ Assumptions that Percy Shelley himself wrote Frankenstein began as early as its anonymous publication in 1818; perhaps misled by its dedication to Godwin and its unattributed inclusion of some lines from Percy Shelley’s poem ‘Mutability’, Walter Scott certainly believed him to be the author when he reviewed the novel for ...”

“... of being Hitler, and launches into a riff on the fact that few people accuse themselves of being anonymous small-time Nazis. His own idea of self-deprecation involves measuring himself against Hitler (twice), Napoleon (twice), Stalin, Dönitz, Speer, Leonardo, Turgenev, J.S. Mill, Shelley and – in his early appetite for experience – ‘a sperm whale ...”