“... on the wagon. Without any outside help (none of ‘that appalling Frank Talk etc’ at Alcoholics Anonymous), and with what must have been heroic strength of will, she quit. A few weeks into the process, she confessed to Deborah that it was now really only at 9.30 a.m. ‘when I do rather crave a drink’. There is, however, a stronger strand of poignancy ...”

“... death and fear of poisoning were associated with the commission of a requiem mass by a mysterious anonymous patron. As his health declined and the unfinished commission (for which he was yet to be paid) weighed on him, Mozart ‘began to speak of death, and declared that he was writing the requiem for himself’. He told Constanze that he could not rid ...”

“... The Exhumation of St Hubert, painted around 1437 in the workshop of Rogier van der Weyden, and the anonymous Mass of Saint Giles of about 1500. In each case, Koerner’s a priori conviction of the theological marginality of the medieval laity is so strong that it causes him to misread what is plainly before him on the painted surface. Van der Weyden’s ...”

“... Early in 1812 Caroline was so impressed by Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, that she wrote Byron an anonymous fan letter. Then, ‘one night at Lady Westmorland’s’, she recounted much later, ‘the women were all throwing their heads’ at the poet. After Lady Westmorland led her up to him, she continued, ‘I looked earnestly at him, and turned on my ...”

“... for some years busied themselves with restating and updating the Old Cause, most daringly in the anonymous pamphlet entitled The Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England (1677), which was the last work of Andrew Marvell. Other republican writers were being dusted off and refurbished, to be published more or less surreptitiously. Paradise ...”

“... the crowds thicken and I have to push my bicycle. The going is hot and slow, but I feel relatively anonymous. Sixteen years ago I drew small crowds of onlookers. The first two streets I reach used to be dominated by carpenters and calligraphers. Spring sunlight lit densely decorated bedsteads and finely carved cupboards. Today, the carpenters have been ...”

“... It is not clear how many different voices can be distinguished: ‘three, four or more anonymous individuals of a people whose identity is not available’. They live in ‘an occupied territory or land where a form of martial law appears in operation’. What it is to speak, to say, to mean, is continually at issue in Translated Accounts. The ...”

“... there is cause to worry about the safety of an elder brother in France. In December 1943 the anonymous play is accepted with enthusiasm, put into rehearsal and premiered in March 1944. Bucharest is bombed, and all who can flee the city. 8 April 1944: ‘no one is left but us.’ On the same day, ‘Mary, the young manicurist who used to come every ...”

“... Bandini strongly resembles the hero of Hamsun’s other great novel, Hunger. But unlike Hamsun’s anonymous narrator, Bandini has a name, which he reiterates constantly: ‘Arturo Bandini, famous writer’; ‘bold and brazen Bandini’; ‘Bandini, author of The Little Dog Laughed’. This is partly Fante’s ironic distancing of himself from his alter ...”

“... epigraph: it opens on a beach, whose fine sand is waiting to receive the footprints of the as yet anonymous protagonist. And fifty years on from that novel, in La Reprise, we’re back on the sands almost straight away, with a protagonist who has already undergone duplication following what both are and aren’t his own footprints; they won’t ...”

“... trying to cheer up their husbands’, walk beside them. The second unforgettable source is an ‘anonymous diarist’, a young German woman who recorded all her thoughts as well as her experiences. Bombardment, rape, defeat and hunger all fell on her, but something inside her stayed cool and amused. Even before Berlin fell, she noted how women’s feelings ...”

“... you start to miss the spiritedly melodramatic understatement of his 1960s novels, in which anonymous men hatch nightmarish schemes while moaning about government-issue radiators, and the darkness is invariably laid on extra-thick. In one respect, the end of the Cold War and the shift from mutually assured destruction to asymmetric conflict ...”

“... Doré’s, and its line drawings depict not a landmark LA, but the back-alley Los Angeles of anonymous dead-ends. Each of the 34 cantos has a frontispiece above the argument and a full-page illustration inside. Canto I sets the stage nicely with a tipped-over shopping cart on what appears to be a vacant lot. The words ‘Canto I’ seem to be ...”

“... life. In this form, empathy can start to look like a cover for prejudice. The Palestinian Zina – anonymous by family request – ‘has a history of problems’, whereas the Israeli Malki Roth, killed by the Sbarro bomb that Zina played her part in planting, was a ‘well-balanced, wholesome teenager’; Rachel Levy, killed in March 2002 by Ayat al-Akhras in ...”

“... him to join a cell of five students. It met every Thursday evening at a location revealed by an anonymous telephone call. Husain was made to promise never to disclose the name of his instructor, but he gives it here: Farid Kasim, one of the party’s high-profile members and a former activist in the Socialist Workers’ Party. At each meeting the initiates ...”