“... 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 ...”

“... nice joke, because Penrith-Smith combines both an English place-name, and the most anonymous, least curious surname in English) has told Jacques that he is not called Dafydd Elias but Jacques Austerlitz. Jacques asks, with the enforced politeness of the English schoolboy, ‘Excuse me, sir, but what does it mean?’ To which Mr Penrith-Smith ...”

“... Autobiography of a Super-Tramp. Bored, middle-aged, and dissatisfied with his posh friends, the anonymous narrator decides it’s time to marry and, after his first two proposals are turned down, resolves ‘to trouble no more about respectable women, but to find a wife in the common streets’. Emma, the pretty young woman he meets one night by a bus stop ...”

“... Nip/Tuck, about Miami plastic surgeons. The role of her mother was played by Vanessa Redgrave. In Anonymous (2011), a conspiracy theory film based on the notion that Shakespeare was really the Earl of Oxford, Joely plays the young Elizabeth I and Vanessa plays the old version. Later this year, Joely’s 21-year-old daughter Daisy Bevan will appear in her ...”

“... agreed that a famous person revealing their own clinical despair could only be helpful to the anonymous millions struggling in silence with the stigma of mental illness. Fry was applauded in the columns, on TV and on the front pages, called courageous and thanked for speaking out and bringing great benefit to those suffering from misunderstood mood ...”

“... deliberately killed without trial by their own government did not arise again until 2010, when an anonymous US official told the Washington Post that Anwar al-Awlaki, a US-born Muslim cleric and online celebrity among Islamic radicals, was on a kill list. ‘He’s working actively to kill Americans,’ the official said, ‘so it’s both lawful and sensible ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with his credit card, and created an email-based dating service. Subscribers were given anonymous addresses from which to send out their profiles with a photo attached. The photos arrived as hard copy, and Kremen and his employees scanned them in by hand. Interested single people who did not yet have email could participate by fax. By 1994 modems ...”

“... and ‘global intelligence’ firm in Texas, which was obtained by the hacktivist collective Anonymous and released by WikiLeaks six months ago? Among the 5.5 million messages, several relate to Assange and one of them, from Fred Burton, the company’s ‘vice president for counter-terrorism and corporate security’, says simply: ‘Not for Pub – We ...”

“... awareness of the Nouvelles en trois lignes by claiming, in a newspaper column – appropriately anonymous – that they had ‘invented’ the ‘words at liberty adopted by the Futurists’. Their clandestine reputation and significance has, over the century, become an idée reçue. Here it is, as related by Hilary Spurling in her biography of ...”