“... brief mention of The Maltese Falcon in accounting for film noir’s preoccupation with bleakly anonymous lobbies, passages and hallways. But it’s not the skills and attitudes required to negotiate these spaces that interest Luckhurst. In his view, corridors have a meaning rather than a function. Film noir, he says, set out to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Constantinople – that she was ‘healed by the image’ – is, he admits, misleading. As the anonymous Byzantine Greek writer who recorded the incident is at pains to specify, the woman was not made whole by the frescoed wall, but by the saints whom the painting represented. The woman herself, the writer insists, understood that God was working on her ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in large-format full colour by David Moore. The Last Things (Dewi Lewis, £25) opens with an anonymous quote – ‘Ministry of Defence official, London 2007’ – that reads: ‘I don’t understand how you’ve got this far.’ What follows is a series of shots of unpeopled hallways and decontamination chambers, a pot-plant here, a lectern ...”

“... the paintings show his wives, children, friends, colleagues and fellow artists, as well as many anonymous figures, they reach you by bringing to mind blurred images of your own. In Richter’s portrait-making, looking at photographs has taken the place of looking at the world. The quality of the marks that record the image is as central to the force of his ...”

“... rumbling heartbeats also connect the installation to another Boltanski project, another angle on anonymous individuality called Les Archives du coeur: a compendium of recordings of the human heart kept on a Japanese island, which the artist has been collecting since 2005. Visitors to the Grand Palais are invited to go to a side room where theirs can be added ...”

“... dummy dressed in jacket, shirt, tie and trousers; tables stacked with shirts; dump bins, anonymous bags, an ironing-board and a stepladder. Full size, these things might be found in any garment district. The bins and racks are the sort you see wheeled from one ‘wholesale only’ showroom to another; in Mens Suits they re-create the back-room ...”

“... and the narratives offered by her images insist that those who suffer are not only victims. Her anonymous weavers, labourers, peasants, prisoners are crushed only because they have first risen up. Most often, the prints show us something that has just happened, or is soon to occur. An exhausted peasant hones a scythe, a woman lies raped among flowers, a man ...”

“... the captions would have named the clothes, not the models; here in the Portrait Gallery the anonymous model becomes the subject. The book even has a foreword by one of them – Iman. She says Parkinson was nice to work with, that he was amusing and led the model on, as in a dance. Her job was to work out ‘the perfect retort, expressed through my ...”

“... to the style of the building. Both building and sculpture are technically accomplished, coolly anonymous and assured. The sculpture consists of almost 27,000 fine, closely spaced wires stretching from the top of the atrium space to a shallow water-filled tray at the bottom. Glass balls strung on these wires, which are never quite still, are clustered to ...”

“... but the trench coat lives on. One strand of design theory found favourite examples in simple, anonymous objects – silver spoons, country chairs, industrial sheds and so on – and looked to a future beyond fashion. That this was a mirage became clear when modern ceased to mean new and became Modern, the style. There are still timeless designs to be ...”

“... is the hero, the mother who covers her face the heroine, the boy being operated on merely an anonymous haunch. There are plenty of sentimental bedside pictures, and terrible ones, but even Munch’s sick child and various paintings of dying wives and mistresses tend to put you in the place of the troubled witness not the sick person. Only fiction (The ...”

“... of a taxi and used the internet to get it back, the 100 young New Yorkers who were persuaded by an anonymous email to converge on Macy’s department store and stare in silence together at an expensive rug. Shirky argued that the internet had opened up the possibility of an exciting new form of leaderless social co-ordination. From now on, he said, blogging ...”

“... and authenticity’.I am struck by her loneliness. She wanted to merge with the masses, to be anonymous and unobtrusive – a worker, a farmhand, a trade unionist, a soldier – one among many, working and fighting alongside others. Yet she found true solidarity hard to come by. Everywhere she went, she stood out. She was often the only woman; she was ...”