“... their number has grown over the years, as earlier identifications have proved untenable. Now these anonymous sitters are distinguished only by some particularity of costume or composition – ‘Unknown Woman with a Thistle’ or ‘a Cherry’, ‘a Jewelled Hat’, ‘a Lace Cap’, ‘Standing in a Room’, ‘in Bed’ or simply ‘Unfinished’.These ...”

“... taking cover wherever possible and converging for horde attacks on key enemy positions. In an anonymous pamphlet of 1794, Metternich described the consequences: ‘Old men and children, willing or unwilling, timid or brave, all fought in the same ranks. Peoples attacked armies and small forces had to resist enormous masses. Thousands fell on one side, and ...”

“... and they’ve been shunted off the fast track to run this dead-end inquiry in an anonymous building far from the centres of power. Throughout the Slough House novels there are repeated references to the difference between Moscow rules (‘Watch your back’) and London rules (‘Cover your arse’). London rules make an appearance in The ...”

“... state. In February, it sold a lease for a military-controlled gems mine in central Myanmar to an anonymous buyer for $4 million, on the understanding that the mining rights will only come into effect if the military is toppled. It has sold interest-free ‘Spring Revolution bonds’ and shares in military-owned real estate on a similar basis. The bonds have ...”

“... of paranoia and intrigue. Loyalists denounced the fired professors for various unspeakable crimes, anonymous statements circulated in their defence, conspirators huddled in dark corners, and observers from the AAUP, the academic professionals’ association, were escorted off the premises by security. I’d been too recently hired to stack up any plausible ...”

“... waged on Twitter and some of it on his blog, ‘The Wee Flea’, where in May 2014 he published an anonymous open letter to Lorna Hood, the incoming moderator of the Church of Scotland, who had complained that certain congregations were still debarring women from entering the pulpit. The author of that letter, revealed by the Daily Record as Kate ...”

“... past, before returning home to die. Flush is the history of a dog who makes it happily into an anonymous modernity. Its escapism let Woolf play with those relativising perceptions which elsewhere risked destabilising, even depleting the self as well as deconstructing the idea of a commonality – a risk-taking which impelled her to write. In the more ...”

“... Corner Window’, included in Wortsman’s collection, takes the form of a dialogue between the anonymous narrator and his cousin, an author now on his deathbed – as Hoffmann was when he wrote the story – who was famous for ‘pumping out all manner of charming narratives’ (this is a bit of a leap from the original ‘allerlei anmutige Geschichten ...”

“... his first work at the Bank, Soane’s idiosyncratic antique style had already been satirised in an anonymous poem entitled ‘The Modern Goth’ (‘To see pilasters scored like loins of pork,/To see the Order in confusion move,/Scroles fixed below and Pedestals above,/To see defiance hurled at Greece and Rome’ etc, etc). When Soane heard that this had been ...”

“... clear and coherent with its all-verse unity, compared to the sense of confusion and formless, anonymous bustle that many have found in Henry VI Part I. Henry has nothing like the superb theatrical rhetoric, in both word and action, that accompanies Richard. There was for Shakespeare, as there still is now, little to say about Henry. Not without decency ...”

“... officials who might help. ‘Your project is beautiful,’ one deputy minister who asked to remain anonymous told her. ‘I’d like to help. But remember Oscar Lewis. In Cuba, oral history is taboo.’Lewis and his team spent eighteen months interviewing Cubans, but in 1970 the Communist Party shut down the project. Raúl Castro accused him of working for the ...”

“... PlayStation, giving myself brain damage.’ She moves into the spare room of a friend of a friend. Anonymous women return: those who have attended her readings (like Debré, she has become an infamous author), those she picks up at cafés, a female police officer she eyes up. She sleeps with a ‘real butch, for a change’. The catalogue continues: ‘I go ...”

“... the work wasn’t taken seriously was that it eluded concepts of authorship: the stories were anonymous and composed at different periods in different places. The architecture of the frame story – Scheherazade telling stories to the sultan every night till dawn to save her life – insisted on the oral, collective, immemorial character of the ...”

“... Entwistle spent most of his time. The global theatre of the internet, on whose enormous stage anonymous actors experiment with personae, using whimsical screen-names and avatars that can be changed from moment to moment, is a haven for the insecure. Shy teenage girls turn into bold sirens on their MySpace and Facebook pages, and it’s a safe bet that ...”

“... are Ebenezer Howard, Raymond Unwin and Patrick Abercrombie. The baddies, apart from hosts of anonymous speculative builders and town hall bureaucrats, are exemplified by Lutyens and Corbusier: Lutyens because his cult of the monumental turned the official city (New Delhi) into a huge façade behind which the rest was left to its own devices, and ...”