“... 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 ...”

“... and Luxembourg made them exempt from UK taxes. Also known as bearer bonds, they were fully anonymous and could be redeemed by anyone who possessed the physical certificates. This game of jurisdictional Twister, as Bullough puts it, resulted in the creation of a ‘bond paying a good rate of interest, on which no one had to pay tax of any kind, and ...”

“... in the camp, the Al-Kamandjâti Music Centre, was burned to the ground. Soon there were anonymous leaflets denouncing the theatre as a plot by Jews and foreigners to ‘denigrate the memory of our martyrs’. Juliano responded by taking his case to the community. He organised public meetings; he spoke to the local imams. ‘We faced our ...”

“... Stafford returned to her old habits. Apparently no one suggested that she go to Alcoholics Anonymous, and on her own she was unable to control her drinking. There also seems to be little evidence that Sherfey was able to help Stafford accept the contradictions of a woman’s mind. In any case, years of therapy did not enable her to come to terms with ...”

“... previously left in the world of lost things and unfiled newsprint. Much of Hazlitt’s life is as anonymous and ephemeral as some of the journals to which he contributed: until Jones’s researches not much was known even of Hazlitt’s second wife, a widow of Scottish family who had been out in the Caribbean, and who abandoned Hazlitt in much the same ...”

“... It is evident that in picking on Taylor, the Greater Manchester Police chose the wrong target (an anonymous confidant – one of several in Taylor’s book – told him that initially two other Manchester businessmen had been fingered as fall guys, but had been discarded because they were Irish and because they were financially more secure than Taylor). A ...”

“... graduation from college. These were his years of apprenticeship as a writer: the publication of anonymous tales and essays culminated in the appearance of Twice-Told Tales (1837) when he was 33. Only after he met and fell in love with Sophia Peabody, herself a woman of ‘delicate’ health who suffered all her life from frequent and debilitating ...”

“... reasoning: I ring up the telephone company on being unable to locate my bill and am told by an anonymous voice that it comes to $165 and is due on 15 June. No thought of determining the veracity and reliability of the witness occurs to me nor, given that the total is within tolerable limits, does the balancing of probabilities figure in my ...”

“... the peaceful execution of this exodus. Thus he has also set up an organisation called Anti-Semites Anonymous, complete with a 12-point programme aimed at nipping hate-dependency in the bud. He travels with his companion, Jinx Possesski, a Polish-American oncology nurse who used to be a raving anti-semite until she learned to give her life over to a power ...”