“... identity’, to show the way women are fetishised in images, made ‘both generic and anonymous’, effaced. But it seems to me that The Flamethrowers is trying to suggest something rather more interesting, that being a China girl isn’t really that different from pretending to be – or even from being – Flip Farmer. Both move swiftly over a ...”

“... from Antwerp to Rome, through some of the bloodiest episodes of the Reformation. The narrator is anonymous, of course, or rather polyonymous. ‘The names are the names of the dead,’ he says in the prologue, looking back from 1555. A student at Wittenberg, he becomes a follower of the radical theologian Thomas Müntzer after witnessing a dispute between ...”

“... her hair merely brown. But there is no definite decision. ‘It is best to leave the Dark Lady anonymous, even composite.’ Burgess was writing before A.L. Rowse, exercising his superior historical method and unmatched intellect, announced that she was incontrovertibly Emilia Lanier. Burgess might have liked that idea, which has a certain glamour because ...”

“... a report has been received from the War Office …’ The key information was then inserted by anonymous orderlies: a reference number and the branch of the record office handling the information; the form’s date of issue; the soldier’s service number, name, rank and regiment; and the location where he had been killed, which was kept deliberately ...”

“... by German scholars of a hundred years ago? Answer: Harold Bloom cares. For corporate or anonymous authorship is what Bloom has set his face against from his initial sailing out between the beacons of Ralph Waldo Emerson on the one headland, William Blake on the other. For Bloom, romantic individualism has always been the only game in town; and he ...”

“... dominate Britain’s literary scene?’ Without so much as a flutter of irony, Moss quotes an anonymous ‘leading critic’ denouncing ‘the media’s obsession’ with Rushdie etc for ‘blocking the emergence of new writers’. The media’s obsession reflects a combination of idleness and herd instinct, or – to put it more kindly ...”

“... also scrupulous about crediting his collaborators while the craftsman who made Gravestone remains anonymous. Shrigley, who claims to like the ‘crafty’ aspects of art, does do his own ceramics, however. They are as technically unrefined as the drawings, making play with modish studio pottery as well as the humbler end of domestic ware. The Philosopher is a ...”

“... sometimes with abusive notes scrawled on notes, in a prefiguration of flame wars between anonymous website posters (it isn’t a coincidence that since the internet became ubiquitous, toilet graffiti have almost disappeared). But with Kindle the book is no longer a passive surface. It constantly checks in with all the other versions of itself and ...”

“... of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, now BP. But these are widely spaced and stand alone, almost as anonymous in both style and subject as the decorative keystones over the deep-set windows by Broadbent and Sons. Just as polite 18th-century architecture can seem to accuse Hawksmoor’s heavy elements of roughness and lack of finesse, so this building with its ...”

“... these accounts do not loom large in the biography; for much of the time Wilson is, if not an anonymous or impersonal figure, certainly a background one, even in her tender care for the Brownings’ child Pen, a devotion which he affectingly remembered and repaid in her old age. Lady’s Maid attempts not just to flesh out an interesting, somewhat ...”

“... these episodes imprints them on the memory. This is the sort of mythic narrative that is so often anonymous. And in a sense this is still the case with Facey. He wrote it down at the end of his life. He lived only nine months after the book was published, and though it rapidly achieved acclaim he did not live to witness its full success. Indeed, that success ...”

“... delighted in flouting convention – an inclination that I am sure was fostered by his wife, the anonymous author of Madame Solario. I arrived at Putnam the week before the publication of All Quiet on the Western Front, that historic best-seller, one of the few that are still read fifty years on. It was a radical book in its day, and my first political ...”

“... concerned with rituals and the way of life of particular groups. The End of Days, in which the anonymous central character dies over and over again, has a particular interest in rituals of mourning. After the woman’s first death, as an infant in a small Galician town, her mother covers the mirrors, ‘so the child’s soul wouldn’t turn back’, and ...”

“... a painting. When prices swell, the digits become abstractions. So, too, do the objects: the still-anonymous buyer purchased a painting, but it could as easily have been a mansion, a yacht, an island, or a horse. And although Leonardos are exceedingly rare, this one was considered a dud: ‘a thumping epic triumph of branding and desire over connoisseurship ...”

“... six of them – however carefully they try to prevent it. Felix ‘Lix’ Dern lives in an anonymous Central European city, where after a twenty-year thaw totalitarianism is making a creeping return. The narrator is a neighbour – he’s always going on about ‘our city’ – if an anonymous, disembodied ...”