“... by acres of woodland deep in Buckinghamshire. Simon Garfield first came across Pratt as one of the anonymous volunteers who kept a diary for Mass Observation, the organisation set up in 1937 which sought to capture the mood and mores of the British public; he included her in three earlier anthologies of contributors (Our Hidden Lives, We Are at War and Private ...”

“... ICAP in June. Its poll of banks is conducted in the US at 9.15 a.m. New York time; inputs are anonymous; and each bank is asked to report the rates at which a typical bank with a high credit rating could borrow, not those at which it itself could. Despite these differences, however, the resulting numbers have tended not to differ much from US dollar ...”

“... would be better not to continue with its case, allowing al-Megrahi to be freed immediately. This anonymous senior officer’s testimony chimes with the well-trodden theory that the American government had a hand in fixing the trial. Hans Köchler, the UN observer at Camp Zeist, reported at the time that the trial was politically charged and the verdict ...”

“... who had nothing fixed in their lives but their work and their personal tics. Now Keith lives in anonymous hotel rooms, plays at blank tables, waits in the casino bar for the next game: ‘The whole place stank of abandonment.’ In this vacancy, he finds one of the only other survivors of their old poker nights, Terry Cheng, who wants to talk both poker and ...”

“... as a Parliamentary reporter), this sound is frequently counterpointed by a different rhythm: one anonymous early reviewer acutely noted ‘the many delicate remarks which are interspersed among the declamations’. In Hazlitt’s writing we often sense that an emphatic commitment is being played off against a meditative self-consciousness. Hazlitt is a good ...”

“... Here is the other side of the story, from the point of view of the unsung, long-suffering, largely anonymous, patiently serviceable infantry. Some of the leading characters, admittedly, were infantry officers of some eminence. In the page of mug-shots at the end of this book, Sir Warren Fisher, head of the Civil Service and nominally of the Treasury, too, for ...”

“... that ‘high’ familiar to most performers, was another factor leading him to crave these anonymous encounters, fleeting sex, usually with guardsmen or soldiers making . . . a bit extra on top of army pay. What was new and disturbing – and what surely explains the mentions of shame and self-recrimination – was the element of increasingly seeking ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... detachment’. This is the style, he says, that we think of when we think of Austen – ‘anonymous, impersonal, universal narration’. Austen or Absolute Style is, of course, fabulous (Miller says, in gooey italics, that when we first read Austen it is the style we had been waiting for all our lives), but it is a pose, a fake. Absolute Style knows ...”

“... which for me were its chief delight have migrated upstairs somewhere so we don’t find the anonymous man by a Ferraran painter of which we have a reproduction in Yorkshire, or the plump ladies with their dogs and crimped urine-dyed hair on their 15th-century rooftop. As ever, though, R. spots something extraordinary: a classical brooch of an owl ...”

“... callously complacent middle classes (who remain, for all their proper Christian and surnames, an anonymous chorus) and magnificent (Hugo-like), strangely powerful saints. While Valjean oscillates from victim to saint, one or two anomalous figures – Javert, the Thénardiers – are given the task of rendering the saintliness of the saints ever more ...”

“... of the punishment awaiting them. If they persist, I order them to be led away for execution.’ Anonymous pamphlets, he says, have been circulating accusing people of belonging to the ‘degenerate cult’. Trajan tells him to avoid a witch hunt, and to ignore the pamphlets, but to persist in punishing the confirmed Christians. In their final ...”

“... text could be traced back to a named and identifiable individual rather than to a collective and anonymous tradition, was born when these hymns were ascribed to Enheduana, and that is true regardless of whether the attribution was correct,’ Helle writes. ‘It is in Enheduana’s poems … that authorship was born.’ Helle makes no attempt to think the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”