“... of oneself as a member of a family. There thus appeared two kinds of desire – one for the anonymous man, one for the family man.Let me now say something about what the word ‘solitude’ means. We know three solitudes in society. We know a solitude imposed by power. This is the solitude of isolation, the solitude of anomie. We know a solitude which ...”

“... in the spring of 1917, shortly before his death. His contribution attracted the censure of an anonymous reviewer in the Times, who argued that these vignettes of rural England were an ‘absurdity’ in the context of ‘the tremendous life of the last three years’, but also elicited the first of several fine appreciations from Walter de la Mare, who ...”

“... the work wasn’t taken seriously was that it eluded concepts of authorship: the stories were anonymous and composed at different periods in different places. The architecture of the frame story – Scheherazade telling stories to the sultan every night till dawn to save her life – insisted on the oral, collective, immemorial character of the ...”

“... Mary Shelley.’ Assumptions that Percy Shelley himself wrote Frankenstein began as early as its anonymous publication in 1818; perhaps misled by its dedication to Godwin and its unattributed inclusion of some lines from Percy Shelley’s poem ‘Mutability’, Walter Scott certainly believed him to be the author when he reviewed the novel for ...”

“... with the priest. If it was necessary to rewrite recent history, the will was there to do it. An anonymous pamphlet published in summer 1555 painted a terrifying picture of a Protestant England in which the fabric of society had been eroded, all good order broken, the magistrates contempned, and the people so farre divided that the father dread the ...”

“... of being Hitler, and launches into a riff on the fact that few people accuse themselves of being anonymous small-time Nazis. His own idea of self-deprecation involves measuring himself against Hitler (twice), Napoleon (twice), Stalin, Dönitz, Speer, Leonardo, Turgenev, J.S. Mill, Shelley and – in his early appetite for experience – ‘a sperm whale ...”

“... of Agriculture on the state of pig-breeding in Staffordshire in 1796 includes an engraving of an anonymous painting of a pig belonging to Mr Dyott of Freeford Manor, Lichfield. The pig’s coat is dark, the snout long – characteristics of a wild animal – but he is very nearly spherical and is said to have weighed 800 lbs at two and a half years. The ...”

“... the scene is taken from a news article, where the line is not attributed to Cheney but to an anonymous staffer, and spoken about Bush, not directly to him.) And there is one glimpse at how adept Cheney was at pushing Bush’s macho buttons: Dick Cheney was concerned about the slow diplomatic process. He warned that Saddam Hussein could be using the time ...”

“... dipped in acid; things fell off, skin was removed.’ And through it all, Clay keeps getting anonymous text messages from whoever is watching him. You could be forgiven for thinking that all this will eventually add up to something. Clay certainly thinks it should. A lot of the second half of this book consists of him trying to get people to tell him ...”

“... philosophical conversations, then borrowed the manuscript and arranged for it to be printed as an anonymous book. Mendelssohn was astonished to find that he had been tricked into becoming a published author, but in the event he was grateful. His work was respectfully received: critical opinion was divided over his attacks on the ‘well-bred ignorance’ of ...”

“... head.’ Threats like this are a criminal offence – and there’s a big difference between being anonymous online and being physically untraceable – but the police rarely take action in such cases. So even though the account was suspended and the tweets deleted (they passed the ‘direct, specific threat’ test), whoever was behind the account was free to ...”

“... head of department, were also charged. Concerns had been raised about the school’s finances by anonymous whistleblowers. An investigation was undertaken by the Education Funding Agency; in October 2013 its report was leaked to the media. It found that of the £182,933 grant paid to the school, only £19,872 could be corroborated by the school’s ...”

“... the general. Just another day in the war against Corbyn. The Sunday Times had previously run an anonymous interview with ‘a senior serving general’. ‘Feelings are running very high within the armed forces,’ the general was quoted as saying, about the very idea of a Corbyn government. ‘You would see … generals directly and publicly challenging ...”

“... a similar compass. The casual ubiquity and overwhelming force of death is registered in the great anonymous waves of souls waiting on the wrong side of the waters of hell (‘There they stood, those souls,/Begging to be the first allowed across, stretching out/Arms that hankered towards the farther shore’). Death is reimagined as a release in the athletic ...”

“... justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach’. In the months that followed, Anonymous conducted a series of retributive hacks of the websites of MIT and the US sentencing commission. A bill known as Aaron’s Law was introduced to Congress to amend the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act under which he was indicted. It stalled, was reintroduced ...”