“... nature of his disease.’ He looked up the telephone number of Alcoholics Anonymous. Later, he wrote in his journals: ‘Then, my hands shaking, I open the bar and drink the leftover whiskey, gin and vermouth, whatever I can lay my shaking hands on.’ ‘My God, the suburbs!’ Cheever wrote in 1960. ‘They encircled the city’s ...”

“... winning first prize for both poetry and prose in a competition where all the submissions were anonymous. The sexually explicit content of her work provoked establishment outrage: the head of the local cultural bureaucracy spoke of it as an affront to Austrian decency. What her strict Catholic mother thought is not recorded – she had come to Innsbruck as ...”

“... against the State’ – and in The Reckoning I argue that he was the true author of the anonymous verses known as the ‘Dutch Church libel’, which incited the apprentices of London to riot against immigrant traders. This inflammatory broadside, issued on 5 May 1593, is another important text. It was in some ways the first hint of trouble for ...”

“... his emotional life, scarcely a hint even of his political ideas. The persistent pronoun is now the anonymous, generational ‘we’. The first person singular is reserved for less charged moments, as when a more conventional cursus is touched on: ‘My last term, May-June 1939, was pretty good. I edited Granta, was elected to the Apostles and got a starred ...”

“... and writer, Raja Shehadeh, he writes in Yellow Wind: ‘He seems to be one for whom the blind, anonymous Occupation threatens his personal sense of individualism, rather than his Arab or national identity’ – as if Shehadeh should be saved from his struggle for national identity. What is left of collective identity, indeed of politics, if – in a ...”

“... no sale’. It received some substantial and laudatory reviews, however, and the anonymous reviewer in the Literary Chronicle claimed that Clare had now made good his early promise to be the English equal of Burns. But Clare felt lonely, depressed and alienated. Echoing Exodus, a favourite biblical book, he wrote, ‘I am but as an alien in a ...”

“... had been carried in slave ships four hundred years earlier. The captor’s humiliation of these anonymous beings – unloaded at Guantánamo Bay, crouched in open cages in orange jumpsuits – was deliberately displayed. The watching world needed no knowledge of international humanitarian conventions to understand that what it was seeing was unlawful, since ...”

“... for all time’, this engraving is captioned with an admiring, if rather clumsy couplet from the anonymous Wit’s Recreations: ‘Facetious Middleton, thy witty muse/ Hath pleased all that books or men peruse.’ While similar in shape and dimensions to its Oxford predecessor, the Collected Middleton is even longer and heavier. Although it contains only 29 ...”

“... seeing, not just in David Blaize, his bestselling schoolboy romance (‘I know your secret,’ an anonymous letter sent from Norwood declared), but in the succession of handsome but otherwise strangely ill-matched companions (‘why is he such friends with Fred, and what, I wonder, do they talk about?’ Arthur, who wasn’t always so obtuse, asked of one), a ...”

“... herself on the side of the despised artists’.) In 1938, she submitted a piece for an anonymous fine arts competition; having picked it as the winner, the jury panicked when they discovered it was by a Jewish student. The prize went instead to her friend and comrade, Barbara Petzel, whom we see only briefly in Life? Or Theatre? as a lovelorn ...”

“... clearly did not trust my advice, and now he appeared indifferent to what I thought … Systematic anonymous briefing from people you have known for years, and who are supposed to be on your side, is deeply unpleasant. Living next door to it – literally – was all the harder. I was reminded of the words Henry II uttered about Thomas à Becket: ‘Will no ...”

“... he had met in Amsterdam shortly after his marriage to Fleur unravelled, received a call from an anonymous source who claimed to have a videotape of him having sex with another woman. Expelled from his latest matrimonial home and living with his parents, Netanyahu declared himself the victim of ‘a crime unprecedented in the history of democracy’ and all ...”

“... matter to those who enjoy what he makes ... Things once made stand free of their makers, the more anonymous the better.’ The act of biography is therefore undesirable, if not openly treacherous, a defiance of the poet’s will. Blake can be safely inducted into the Puritan tradition with Milton, Bunyan, Lawrence and, finally, the Quaker Bunting. Skipsey saw ...”

“... Hermann’s name is not on the certificate; the cello is identified only as having belonged to an anonymous artist. Kennedy ends her story with this clue but no resolution.But after Cello’s publication in August last year, one of its readers, the Chinese cellist Jian Wang, remembered that he had heard a young Australian called Sam Lucas play an instrument ...”

“... as both ‘victims of their own religious projections and victims of Western imperialism’. An anonymous reviewer in El Moudjahid, the French-language newspaper of the Algerian National Liberation Front, took strong exception to this claim. The author was almost certainly Fanon, who six years earlier had sent a fan letter to Wright. But by the time White ...”