“... humaine is less on the Chinese, who are well suited by their sheer numbers to play the part of an anonymous collective, than on the murky freelances from Europe – French, German, Italian, Russian – who have found their way to the revolution and now seem, like so many Lawrences of Arabia, to be running it on behalf of the natives. These variously sombre ...”

“... in massed serried ranks, although (again to be seen in The Apartment) there was also a pool of anonymous desks for mute men with accounting machines, like Lemmon as C.C. Baxter. The secretaries lived inside a bubble of closeness to power, looking to burst through it into management or marriage, most likely the latter, geishas at work whose most realistic ...”

“... horrible fear of my own existence’. His report of the crisis, which he attributed to an anonymous sufferer, takes the form of an encounter with an uncanny double: an epileptic patient ‘with greenish skin, entirely idiotic’, whom he had once seen in an asylum, ‘knees drawn up against his chin’ and clad only in a ‘coarse grey ...”

“... is flanked by Ignorance and Suspicion does not bode well. Life was not easy under Savonarola. An anonymous portrait of the preacher shows him in austere profile; the sharp contrast of light and dark, the shaven head, intense gaze and firmly set lips wonderfully capture the psychology of the pious extremist. ‘O merchants, abandon your practice of ...”

“... have had the chance to write more novels of the quality of Caleb Williams. Instead, he lived as an anonymous hack, writing a few novels that were good but not great and whatever else he thought he could sell to support his new wife and their five children. Something similar happened to his good friend the novelist and dramatist Thomas Holcroft. Holcroft had ...”

“... MI5 agent. It is thanks to Francis – who initially gave interviews to Evans and Lewis as an anonymous whistleblower, but has since revealed his identity – that the way the SDS operated is now known in some detail. An officer would begin his or her deployment (one woman, Lynn Watson, is known to have been a police spy) by borrowing the identity of a ...”

“... the Palais-Royal. The focus is as much on the place and its pleasures as on this passing, as yet anonymous client. Robb frequently begins an ‘adventure’ by disguising his protagonist’s identity and the chapter’s theme. Sometimes he starts in the least obvious place: ‘It ended somewhere in England in 1828.’ There is one chapter whose sections are ...”

“... were not only limitations but also possibilities, the gifts of risk and the unforeseen. The anonymous masters of architecture had worked with what they had closest to hand, not with materials they’d selected but with those provided by chance, stone or wood or clay for adobe bricks. His father would touch a dressed stone of granite with his large open ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... act), and because it effaces the personalities of the soldiers in the service of a common and anonymous effort (one of the flagraisers was Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian who left the marines and died a broken man, but there is no way to identify him in the photo). The authors think that we have a ‘need’ for these iconic images, and often suggest that ...”

“... to have characterised Leicester, like every other favourite, is further explored in a striking anonymous manuscript composed soon after his death in 1588. Written by a Protestant, to judge from its reference to the pope as ‘the principal and first founder of purgatory’, it has been known since its rediscovery by D.C. Peck in the 1970s as ‘News from ...”

“... old, sweet, darling mob. My good old London mob.’ As his invented (or reinvented) revenants and anonymous extras vanish from Tower Bridge, a crush of real literary masks, PR folk, media flotsam, Dome apologists brush past them, waving their invitation cards for the launch of Ackroyd’s heritage blockbuster. If they turn to gaze down at the black waters of ...”

“... years later of Princess Margaret Tudor to James IV. ‘London thow art of Towynys A per se’, an anonymous poem, is said in one surviving manuscript copy to have been delivered at a dinner held by the Lord Mayor during the Christmas festivities that accompanied this visit, by ‘a Scottysh preyst sytting at oon of the syde tablys’. The poem is lavish in ...”

“... structured. It is framed by a series of undated, unlocated first-person replies from an anonymous, rather arch lady to those asking for funds and support. Like a Chinese box, each letter contains within itself versions of other letters the writer has received and drafts of the replies which she may send. ‘The fiction of the letters’, in Naomi ...”

“... lawyers didn’t manage to find out much in the open sessions. Consider this exchange between the anonymous Home Office witness known as Witness B – a member of the security services – and Abu Rideh’s barrister, Ben Emmerson QC: Witness B: So far as the open assertion is concerned, it is that he was involved in the facilitation of travel to training ...”