“... strongly autobiographical cast, they behave with the irresponsibility and sometimes the freedom of anonymous texts. One of these, already familiar to many readers, is the emblem originally published under the title ‘Time, Real and Imaginary’: On the wide level of a mountain’s head, (I knew not where, but ‘twas some faery place) Their ...”

“... initiatives (a grant from the Civil List, a subvention from the Society of Authors and an anonymous donation). The rest came from Harriet Weaver, who retroactively paid Joyce £50 for the serialisation of A Portrait and £25 in advance for the serialisation of Ulysses. These were not grand sums: on the eve of the Great War, the average wage for the ...”

“... X with Blairite Y in the fifth most senior post at the Department of Trade and Industry and anonymous accusations from 10 Downing Street of lunacy in Number 11 – while knowing all along that the Chancellor’s camp had a secret which might ruin him. ‘There’s a thermonuclear bomb ticking underneath Mandelson,’ Whelan whispered to lobby ...”

“... forward base for CIA infiltration of the counter-culture (the charge duly crops up, though, in an anonymous article in Progressive Labor from February 1969, entitled ‘Marcuse: Cop-out or Cop?’). Though Marcuse pointed out in a later pow-wow with Habermas that, in common with Franz Neumann, H. Stuart Hughes and Walter Langer, he was but an understrapper in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... his small meannesses and delinquencies – is most of what he has got to think about. He is the anonymous double of his fantasies. In his little experiment on the bus he is trying to find out whether it’s possible to have a secret life. And yet what his alter ago, the narrator, keeps intimating is that he only has a secret life, a life that is secret to ...”

“... a variant of the dilemma that had faced Braque and Picasso: irreducible difference confronting anonymous identity, a dilemma restaged in a different key of agonised inquiry. Pollock, in turn, is followed by a reconsideration of Abstract Expressionism. There are also earlier readings of the various Large Bathers by Cézanne and of the Death of Marat by ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... received, and they will have built networks of contacts. Financial markets aren’t the atomistic, anonymous places portrayed in conventional economic models. Asked how he set up his fund, one manager told me: ‘You call your friends and, you know, just talk through your ideas.’ If they’re persuaded by the ideas, those contacts might decide to invest in ...”

“... suggested I try to publish the thing. So I submitted it to Genders, which secured two supposedly anonymous readers. One, though, was D.A. Miller (possibly Catholic). And the other was Eve. The journal had neglected to delete their names from their reports – reports, I’m happy to say, that were rather positive. I forget what Eve said, but Miller, for some ...”