“... Vermeer, that to go very close is to see what you saw before – a smooth, uniform surface, as anonymous as a projection on ground glass. Velázquez’s surface is strikingly various – a lively calligraphy in which each stroke is adapted to its purpose. There are marks for flames, for cheeks, for gleams on armour and sparkles on braid. As you ...”

“... whom the standard accounts list in ‘an academic variant of the epic catalogue’, but in the anonymous dealers and export agents who between them soaked up well over 60 per cent of the edition. And the lady knew exactly what she was up to, as Ezra Pound did when in mid-1921 he advised his parents to invest in a copy as much on financial as on aesthetic ...”

“... barbarian. Whether she is glorifying the bathers’ nakedness or celebrating, as elsewhere, the anonymous liberties of the veil, Lady Mary insists on seeing Turkish women as freer than their Western counterparts, and delights in overturning her predecessors’ gloomy emphasis on harem confinement. Her report on the bath ends in a characteristic ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Mariani is very good on Crane’s desire, rather than love, for New York; in the city, he could be anonymous and sexually alive. But what he couldn’t do was hold down a job. He wrote advertising copy, but the economic depression of the times conspired with his loathing for the work. So he would sabotage jobs, in order to write, cadge jobs and money from his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is that Perón and Eva were figures in ‘a crass mythology’, and that we know nothing about the anonymous persons who played those roles, a performance only marginally less farcical than that of the man with his doll and his box. But a name is always a role for Borges, an idea of the self, and the interplay between actor and part takes many forms in his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”