“... an appendix devoted to stylometry and Defoe, the authors assert that alternative candidates for an anonymous pamphlet which has been attributed to Defoe are bound to form ‘an unlimited group’. The situation is taken to be, not ‘is this by Middleton or Ford?’, but ‘is this by Defoe or an unknown?’ (or, as the authors put it, ‘Defoe against the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Am I to repine that ‘a 1986 study’ – another vague attribution, incidentally, to the anonymous authority of studies and surveys – ‘found that the numbers living permanently outside the UK had risen from 161 in 1979 to 240 at the time of the survey. Between 1979 and 1986 the proportion living in America rose from 6 per cent to 8 per ...”

“... himself hounded by bores (and Hampstead has several in the Olympic class) and would seek obscure anonymous haunts, a sequestered backyard, in which to take his pint and papers. I once found him sitting thus in the pouring rain, preferring a wetting to an ear-bending. If he was not visiting libraries, he would spend most of the day in his study bashing at his ...”

“... criticise the ideology of the law as to use court records to document the daily life of otherwise anonymous people. Precisely because the colonial courts served the community as an ‘open forum’, intervening heavily in matters we would now regard as private, the testimony of the litigants provides rich evidence of how ordinary people thought, felt ...”

“... Strictures on the charge delivered by Lord Chief Justice Eyre to the Grand Jury’, which, though anonymous, certainly took risks by its outspoken line on the prosecution of Thelwall and his friends. He also wrote a powerful novel of social protest, Things As They Are, or Caleb Williams, in which the central characters, Falkland and Caleb, master and man, act ...”

“... it all: he has a star witness, who was there, sur place in the trenches, but begged to remain anonymous, leaving Dona Tranquilina’s grandson to the courage of his concoctions. ‘These beasts,’ the socialist writer writes about the Gurkhas, a racial minority, ‘were so bloodthirsty that when the battle was over, they went on killing their own ...”

“... It is also coy. Since this is the love that dares not speak its name, the sex, when it is not anonymous, is pseudonymous, with over a score of the participants footnoted ‘not his real name’. Nor are the names under which they do appear of a noble simplicity. Here is no Chuck, no Rick, no Lance. Ms Farnan has lavished much art on these fellatious ...”

“... which a householder’s reputation might be quickly learned. Panels today are drawn from vast and anonymous catchment areas: the defence is presented with faceless names drawn from an electoral list, a meaningless swathe of names and addresses, from which the one point of purchase – the ‘additions’ or occupations – was struck out in 1973 by Lord ...”

“... act’ because it reminds ‘the Management … that the managed are people with faces, not anonymous numbers.’ The Management here resembles the administration of what he elsewhere calls Hell, ‘for in Hell, as in prison and the army, its inhabitants are identified not by name but by number. They do not have numbers, they are numbers.’ For Auden ...”

“... their acceptance of necessary descriptive duties. The result is that, line by line, she may be as anonymous, as manifold or, better, as mistakeable as a great poet gets. Other poets are predictably and more or less unvaryingly themselves, like cellophane packs of cigarettes from a vending machine; with Bishop you get the surprise gift in a plastic ball ...”

“... volunteering to test the anatomical plausibility of the dirty stories they were assembling for an anonymous benefactor. He was an insatiable seducer, and a bold one too: one night after dinner with Kael and her boyfriend, Duncan cornered the boyfriend and flashed his erection (‘I can give you a better fuck than Pauline can!’). The habit of treating his ...”

“... started with Chronicle of Current Events, a survey of repressive Soviet actions prepared by anonymous dissidents in the Soviet Union, which he edited, translated and disseminated from 1968, at first on his own account and later under the auspices of Amnesty International. Then he took up the cause of national dissidents – Crimean ...”

“... while both The Tempest and Cymbeline borrow from Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, a creaky anonymous play of the early 1580s about an exiled courtier who lives in a cave and exercises magical powers derived from his books. The plots of the late plays revert nakedly towards fairy tale, in ways Ben Jonson, for one, found embarrassing: in 1614, in the ...”

“... of an Italian scholar enslaved by Ottoman Turks. Captured at sea while travelling to Naples, the anonymous narrator ends up as the property of Hoja, an Istanbul scholar who’s curious about ‘Frankish’ ways. The two become collaborators – first on firework displays for the sultan, and then on containing an outbreak of plague that the Ottoman ...”