“... phone, shaking & foaming at the mouth … I recognised a baseness in you.’ She intercepted an anonymous letter that had come to Feynman’s house, addressed to ‘Occupant’: ‘Dirty Dick, Filthy Fucking Feynman dates you. He will never marry you. Tell him he has made you pregnant. You’ll make a quick $300-$500.’ The girlfriend took the Einstein ...”

“... first to note that Palestinian return was subject to Israeli power even at the time of his death (anonymous intelligence personnel threatened to cancel his funeral), just as he was the first to note that in 1988 the Palestine National Council and the PLO had changed themselves from a liberation movement into a national independence movement – a far lesser ...”

“... by Curnow’s account of the siege at Glenrowan (the final description of Kelly’s execution is anonymous). By the end, Kelly has become, if not corrupted, then at least, like Prince Hal, compromised by his new-found power. (There is a wealth of irony in a fictional representation of Ned Kelly, outlaw and Australia’s unofficial national hero, admiring a ...”

“... with a thrillingly implausible plot, an impressive display of learning, and a well-aimed attack on anonymous big business. In Lemprière’s Dictionary, everything works out in the end: the bad guys get wasted (in a gloriously over the top way) and the good guy gets the girl. In the Shape of a Boar is less assured, and stronger for it; a more serious ...”

“... to burn a pile of wax paper. The peculiarity of the story, or collection of episodes, is in the anonymous narration: the narrator is in love with combustion, and associated with it (the woman in the car was his aunt). He records every fire faithfully. Some are telegraphically expressed in footnotes, added for a sense of satisfying completeness; some are ...”

“... fascinated by printing); so famous for it, in fact, that he was credited with the authorship of an anonymous treatise on bronze casting. Far from being sedentary, Alberti declared that he preferred patrolling the streets of cities and examining buildings to reading about them. He organised the first experiment in underwater archaeology, using complex lifting ...”

“... with him in principle) and for us. His arguments – and those of the other writers, known and anonymous, Reynolds gathered together – were angry, exposing the faultlines in Tudor thought about religion and politics, and speaking for a world much less settled than we might imagine. A manuscript satire from the 1590s included in the book shows Queen ...”

“... Carlile, a ‘free-thinker’. The TLS published an acerbic review of Walmsley’s book whose anonymous author was later revealed to be E.P. Thompson. In The Making of the English Working Class, the second edition of which was published in 1968, Thompson depicted Peterloo as a bloody class conflict orchestrated by the magistrates and, most likely, by the ...”

“... die’, becomes a leitmotif. Queen Elizabeth, ‘Lilibet’ to her family, has the taste of an ‘anonymous mouse’ and makes ‘clockwork conversation’. The Duke of Edinburgh’s boudoir, while at least giving evidence of a ‘positive but somewhat vulgar personality’, had ‘sofas and armchairs covered in virulent magenta chintz … Naval pictures and ...”

“... who is gravely ill. As they sit together, a servant delivers a letter to Françoise. It is anonymous. It begins: ‘Madame, I have loved you for a long time but I can neither tell you nor not tell you. Forgive me.’ It ends: ‘You are so nice, take pity on me, I am dying because I cannot have you.’ Françoise thinks she will show the letter to her ...”

“... a pantomime horse anatomically convincing. On awakening from his slumber, the narrator of this anonymous tract finds his brother bending benevolently over him, looking forty rather than ten years older than when he saw him last. This premature ageing is the result of the 1832 Reform Bill, which has allowed the state to confiscate their father’s property ...”

“... him in the heart. When Charles heard that Buckingham was dead, he wept. But others celebrated. An anonymous ballad declared that Buckingham’s ‘name shall be/For ever hateful to posterity’.As its title suggests, The Scapegoat is a largely sympathetic portrait of a brilliant man who was deliberately ‘paraded before a homosexual king’, catapulted to ...”

“... Thurston’s Of the Subcontract. Or Principles of Poetic Right (2013) outsources its authorship to anonymous gig workers. Its hundred poems, all written to order and purchased via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk online platform, are reproduced alongside details of the hourly rate, time spent and total paid for each, ranging from one cent to one dollar. (Even the ...”

“... that has contributed heavily to Donors Trust, a ‘dark money’ fund – most of its donors are anonymous – which funnelled tens of millions of dollars to conservatives who support Donald Trump’s bogus claims of election fraud in 2020. Thomas Klingenstein, a NatCon regular, gave $100,000; he is chair of the Claremont Institute, the Californian think ...”

“... at how many of the really top jobs are held by them.’ He was right, of course. To disprove the anonymous allegation, he showed me the evidence of a full and fair recruitment process for each of the positions. ‘What can I do? If they are the only suitable ones to apply, they are the ones that are going to get the jobs. No one asks the CEO why he has ...”