“... it across the river gorge at their foot; the wharves of Antwerp, crowded with ships, as an anonymous artist caught them in the early 16th century. The illustrations that best reflect Spufford’s themes, though, are those that give vivid expression to the richness of the luxury goods and products demanded by the wealthy: a suit of fine armour from ...”

“... with the work and person of Hooke’s patron, the Honourable Robert Boyle. Boyle’s first, and anonymous, publication invited ‘all true lovers of Vertue & Mankind, to a free and generous Communication of their Secrets and Receits in Physick’, and condemned ‘the avarice’ of those ‘secretists’ who secured profit through the practice of ...”

“... vanity was excluded’; it was an eventually unsuccessful search for what Braque called ‘the anonymous personality’, whereby the painting would stand by and for itself, unsigned and self-free. It was all this, and all as high-minded as this; but it was also personal, playful, companionable. It was Braque teasing (and delighting) the dressy Picasso by ...”

“... one thing find themselves saying another; bits of text are pointlessly scrambled; the writing of anonymous others finds its way into notebooks believed to have been private. Among these distractions the significance of Chris’s talent (if talent is what it is) is lost, until finally precocity occludes genius, the transience of the one perhaps figuring the ...”

“... during this period there were two main audiences for depictions of the loves of Jupiter: anonymous consumers of pornography, and the Holy Roman Emperor. Correggio’s Loves were given to Charles V by Federico Gonzaga; Perino’s tapestries were woven for his visit to Genoa, and the gallery of Francis I was hurriedly completed for Charles’s visit in ...”

“... of Blessington: ‘Truly and devotedly did I love her for fifteen eventful years.’ In an anonymous memoir of 1848 introducing Landon’s Romance and Reality, Jerdan is restrained: ‘We cannot quite assent to the propositions laid down by preceding biographers that the whole [of Landon’s work] proceeded from imagination and not real feeling. On the ...”

“... in Village Life and Labour, ‘the village labourer of the 19th century’ became ‘a curiously anonymous figure’; a statistic in parish records, a name on birth, death and marriage certificates, an occupation on the census, but not a life. Thompson must have recognised that the interest in her Juniper Hill tales was largely nostalgic, but she also wrote ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Snowden, it turned out, had never left Moscow. Nobody knew exactly where he was: somewhere anonymous in the transit zone, or staying invisibly in the capsule hotel? The Telegraph’s Tom Parfitt was dispatched to find him, and spent 43 hours in the airport not succeeding. But it turned out that the global press pack weren’t the only ones ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... prime minister, and since his day municipal power has dwindled into the opaque Brownian motion of anonymous councillors, save in the recent case of the capital, a platform for lightweight acrobats rather than a ladder to Downing Street. Across the rest of the country, mayors are little more than dummies with gold chains around their necks. Whitehall and ...”

“... government agents or curious historians can see what we did with our time. According to an anonymous Facebook employee interviewed by the online magazine The Rumpus, the company saves ‘all the data on all of our servers’, ‘every hour, of every day’; ‘at least two people,’ the employee says, ‘have been fired’ for spying on accounts. As a ...”

“... scientific experiments is that they can be endlessly replicated.In a report for the publisher, an anonymous reader of the manuscript of my recent book The Ends of Life described my way of working asan Oxford method, which I associate with the work of Christopher Hill, as well as with Keith Thomas. There is always a line of argument, but it tends to be both ...”

“... are unlikely to be very engaged in parliamentary or legislative activities. They remain largely anonymous, but they usually turn up, and vote as instructed. These are the MPs who are beloved of the whips, the so-called lobby fodder, and according to Martin Bell in A Very British Revolution, they are also the MPs who tend to claim the most for ...”

“... are so avant-garde). The internet, as Gould wrote, certainly does enable ‘hordes of frightened, anonymous men to try to silence women via harassment and shaming’, but it also gives women the wherewithal to find one another and form their own horde, as Gould acknowledged, ‘on a grander scale … than before’. ‘The click of recognition’ is what the ...”