“... 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 ...”

“... in the spring of 1917, shortly before his death. His contribution attracted the censure of an anonymous reviewer in the Times, who argued that these vignettes of rural England were an ‘absurdity’ in the context of ‘the tremendous life of the last three years’, but also elicited the first of several fine appreciations from Walter de la Mare, who ...”

“... with the priest. If it was necessary to rewrite recent history, the will was there to do it. An anonymous pamphlet published in summer 1555 painted a terrifying picture of a Protestant England in which the fabric of society had been eroded, all good order broken, the magistrates contempned, and the people so farre divided that the father dread the ...”

“... as Le Goff makes out. There’s far more fairy material in the romances – many of them, like the anonymous L’Elucidation, little known even to scholars – than has been commonly noted, and there’s even more in the voluminous medieval Latin literature of chronicle, vision and plain old gossip. A final thought is that Shakespeare, whose most original ...”

“... Edward II, Robert Greene’s The Scottish History of James the Fourth, Thomas of Woodstock (an anonymous play about Richard II), and Ben Jonson’s Roman play, about which Lake has written acutely elsewhere, Sejanus His Fall. By contrast, none of Shakespeare’s miscreant kings – the two Richards, Claudius, Lear, Macbeth, Leontes – yields to bad ...”

“... stipends. Oxford University Press also found ways to contribute, including acting as a conduit for anonymous donations by the Rockefeller Foundation. Certain individuals emerge as the quiet heroes of the story. It was fortunate that A.D. Lindsay and W.D. Ross, both eminent philosophers and, respectively, master of Balliol and provost of Oriel, were ...”

“... a requiem to commemorate his recently deceased wife and made an inconspicuous approach via an anonymous intermediary. It’s true that Mozart answered a knock on his front door from a stranger, but it wasn’t the grim reaper who paid him a call and commissioned him to write his own requiem. Mozart died on 5 December 1791, leaving the Requiem ...”

“... justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach’. In the months that followed, Anonymous conducted a series of retributive hacks of the websites of MIT and the US sentencing commission. A bill known as Aaron’s Law was introduced to Congress to amend the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act under which he was indicted. It stalled, was reintroduced ...”

“... unceremoniously rapes her. This conclusion resonates, for the teller of the tale is not some anonymous spear-carrier sweating Dutch courage, but the blacksmith Ignat, whose subsequent death in battle will exemplify the redemption of the artisanal class through sacrifice. Alexander hangs around long enough to confirm the brutal outcome of the parable in a ...”

“... death: ‘And then the arrows came. From all directions. Thudding into walls and roof and earth. Anonymous and deadly.’) In an apparent bid for linguistic correctness, he introduces a range of characters with tongue-twisting names like Chithrafarna and Khashayarsha (these being transliterations of the Old Persian for ‘Tissaphernes’ and ...”