“... to prevent the crime, he explains the various ways to go about committing it, such as opening an anonymous Austrian Sparbuch – savings book – of which there are estimated to be twenty-six million in existence (Austria, for the record, has a population of just over eight million). It’s also possible, apparently, to buy your own bank. If, on the other ...”

“... public internet. As we walked Cermak’s endless, windowless corridors, with their white walls and anonymous blue doors, we paused (not for too long: Cermak is under continuous video surveillance; lingering looks suspicious) outside Cermak’s ‘Meet-Me Room’, where the crucial cables connect. ‘The backbone of the internet’ goes through Cermak, I was ...”

“... erased,             weirdly euphonious terms: lymphoma, heroin.       Then an anonymous body             on the sidewalk, a fifth-floor room onto Sixth Avenue,       the aching window open all afternoon.             A man on our block pulled from his car and beaten       with a tyre iron by another ...”

“... bloggy’, by which she means ‘conversational and reckless, composed on the fly for anonymous intimates’. And they are, on the whole, a diverting enough bunch. The best of the lot, though, is the diary of Samuel Pepys, which a web designer called Phil Gyford has been posting in daily instalments since 2003, using the text already online at ...”

“... others were informed, and came from men who had been at sea. Most were signed – a few were anonymous, and these tended to go into the waste-paper basket. Then there arrived one anonymous letter which was quite different from any other letter I had received about the Belgrano. I knew it could only have been written by ...”

“... but the injury is itself framed by the jagged partition where the breast was severed from the anonymous victim – the scalpel repeating the pincers that appear, for example, in paintings of St Agatha’s martyrdom. A male cadaver known as ‘Adam’ can be inspected on a website; the images consist of wafer-thin slices (1871 of them) through the frozen ...”

“... him. In John Banville’s The Book of Evidence it is an inexplicably entrancing portrait by an anonymous Dutch master which pushes Freddie Montgomery over the edge into homicide. Like Banville, Howard Norman and Katharine Weber write about stealing Dutch paintings, and they share a similar attitude to them. For them, Dutch art represents modesty of ...”

“... becomes disconcerting. His source is a manuscript ‘Topographical Description of England’, the anonymous author of which refers to Cotton in passing as ‘my noble assister in this work’. The context suggests that Cotton was being thanked, as he was so often thanked, for technical advice, in this instance on ancient stones. Mr Sharpe is intent on giving ...”

“... has no identifiable single author and is transmitted face to face. It rises from the common anonymous stock of oral recitation and intimate social exchanges. Unlike the novel, it is not immutably fixed in form: nor is it a negotiable commodity. Nor, to add to Benjamin’s distinction, does the story go round with a minatory attached to it as does every ...”

“... deal, and everybody exchanges confidences, or what pass for confidences. A series of taunting, anonymous letters is delivered to the husband. He tells his servants and the police that a housebreaker has stolen a couple of revolvers from him. A few days later he agrees to let his wife go: indeed, at a last dinner together with her and her lover, he raises a ...”

“... with the weird tale, the story based on a deliberate disruption of the natural order. The head is anonymous, sealed in a plastic bag, and being used as a football by a group of boys. The other novels in this batch begin in a similarly disturbing manner. Allen Kurzweil’s A Case of Curiosities opens with the amputation of the hero’s finger. A historical ...”

“... that the real horror he’s discovered is not that he is two, but that he is legion, many, the anonymous masses are living inside him. Ugh! This is what Barker wants Prior to be, the one and the many. In other words, she makes use of his equivocal status – a fictional character rubbing shoulders with real, historical people – to rub in a bitter message ...”

“... and fraught with productive contradiction. To assert the value of the – supposedly – anonymous medieval craftsman against the increasingly dominant gentleman architect, required force of personality. To re-create the colours and textures of the medieval world required all the practical know-how and dedication of the railway age. The composition ...”

“... Atomised (2001), an exhilarating novel of grand sociological conjecture, bold pseudo-science and anonymous sex. Barnes himself is a natural miniaturist: Flaubert’s Parrot and his short stories are the best things he has written. He is at heart a bunny-shooter; but he likes to goes after the big beasts – history, identity, love. The result is that he ...”

“... recent shift from analysing a few great authors to recovering the experience of otherwise anonymous consumers. Decentring is the order of the day. Yet our resentment at Islington Public Library for prosecuting Joe Orton (his marginal annotations were deemed ‘obscene’) depends on our knowledge that Orton was himself a published writer. Coleridge ...”