“... 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 ...”

“... humanise, but signal that a place is perceived as unsocial. They are furtively done, are usually anonymous and almost invariably violent or expressing hate. Did Pasmore really imagine a playgroup contentedly scribbling to make a cheerful equivalent to wallpaper? To confuse such graffiti with his own work, even in jest, is not going to encourage residents of ...”

“... invested in graveyard real estate? Back in the late Forties, at any rate, their families inhabited anonymous, untended tussocks after they died. I think we kids took it for granted that life after death was a class matter. I know we spent many fruitless hours searching for the entrances to the Hanmer and Kenyon vaults, in the expectation of meeting real ...”

“... and Deserved Death of Doctor Iohn Faustus. This was a translation, by one ‘P.F., Gent’, of the anonymous Historia von D. Iohan Fausten (Frankfurt, 1587). Unfortunately the earliest extant edition of the Damnable Life, published by Thomas Orwin in 1592, is not the first. The title page announces it as ‘newly imprinted’, with ‘imperfect matter ...”

“... no feelings higher than loyalty to his master, no ambition greater than to serve. Yet no one so anonymous could have held his own among the barons, nor could anyone who so frequently exercised the power of life and death be quite so mild as the man here depicted. Foccart has broken his long silence at last but there is a sense in which he keeps his secret ...”

“... reason: class distinctions were still so insurmountable in his day that it was only by remaining anonymous that he would be used by socially more elevated politicians as an ally in their causes. The record of his work which Place accumulated and which is now in the British Museum means that this otherwise almost invisible career can be known – by later ...”

“... Studios, on the set of Our Mutual Friend; soon after this Gibreel, further maddened by a spate of anonymous phone calls reflecting Saladin’s gifts of tongues and voices, brings rioting and melodrama to the streets of Brickhall. Gibreel is now transformed into Azraeel, the fire-breathing Islamic angel of death. The multiple film-within-a-film effect is ...”