“... in Village Life and Labour, ‘the village labourer of the 19th century’ became ‘a curiously anonymous figure’; a statistic in parish records, a name on birth, death and marriage certificates, an occupation on the census, but not a life. Thompson must have recognised that the interest in her Juniper Hill tales was largely nostalgic, but she also wrote ...”

“... their acceptance of necessary descriptive duties. The result is that, line by line, she may be as anonymous, as manifold or, better, as mistakeable as a great poet gets. Other poets are predictably and more or less unvaryingly themselves, like cellophane packs of cigarettes from a vending machine; with Bishop you get the surprise gift in a plastic ball ...”

“... Snowden, it turned out, had never left Moscow. Nobody knew exactly where he was: somewhere anonymous in the transit zone, or staying invisibly in the capsule hotel? The Telegraph’s Tom Parfitt was dispatched to find him, and spent 43 hours in the airport not succeeding. But it turned out that the global press pack weren’t the only ones ...”

“... volunteering to test the anatomical plausibility of the dirty stories they were assembling for an anonymous benefactor. He was an insatiable seducer, and a bold one too: one night after dinner with Kael and her boyfriend, Duncan cornered the boyfriend and flashed his erection (‘I can give you a better fuck than Pauline can!’). The habit of treating his ...”

“... prime minister, and since his day municipal power has dwindled into the opaque Brownian motion of anonymous councillors, save in the recent case of the capital, a platform for lightweight acrobats rather than a ladder to Downing Street. Across the rest of the country, mayors are little more than dummies with gold chains around their necks. Whitehall and ...”

“... government agents or curious historians can see what we did with our time. According to an anonymous Facebook employee interviewed by the online magazine The Rumpus, the company saves ‘all the data on all of our servers’, ‘every hour, of every day’; ‘at least two people,’ the employee says, ‘have been fired’ for spying on accounts. As a ...”

“... scientific experiments is that they can be endlessly replicated.In a report for the publisher, an anonymous reader of the manuscript of my recent book The Ends of Life described my way of working asan Oxford method, which I associate with the work of Christopher Hill, as well as with Keith Thomas. There is always a line of argument, but it tends to be both ...”

“... are unlikely to be very engaged in parliamentary or legislative activities. They remain largely anonymous, but they usually turn up, and vote as instructed. These are the MPs who are beloved of the whips, the so-called lobby fodder, and according to Martin Bell in A Very British Revolution, they are also the MPs who tend to claim the most for ...”

“... are so avant-garde). The internet, as Gould wrote, certainly does enable ‘hordes of frightened, anonymous men to try to silence women via harassment and shaming’, but it also gives women the wherewithal to find one another and form their own horde, as Gould acknowledged, ‘on a grander scale … than before’. ‘The click of recognition’ is what the ...”

“... by acres of woodland deep in Buckinghamshire. Simon Garfield first came across Pratt as one of the anonymous volunteers who kept a diary for Mass Observation, the organisation set up in 1937 which sought to capture the mood and mores of the British public; he included her in three earlier anthologies of contributors (Our Hidden Lives, We Are at War and Private ...”

“... ICAP in June. Its poll of banks is conducted in the US at 9.15 a.m. New York time; inputs are anonymous; and each bank is asked to report the rates at which a typical bank with a high credit rating could borrow, not those at which it itself could. Despite these differences, however, the resulting numbers have tended not to differ much from US dollar ...”

“... would be better not to continue with its case, allowing al-Megrahi to be freed immediately. This anonymous senior officer’s testimony chimes with the well-trodden theory that the American government had a hand in fixing the trial. Hans Köchler, the UN observer at Camp Zeist, reported at the time that the trial was politically charged and the verdict ...”

“... who had nothing fixed in their lives but their work and their personal tics. Now Keith lives in anonymous hotel rooms, plays at blank tables, waits in the casino bar for the next game: ‘The whole place stank of abandonment.’ In this vacancy, he finds one of the only other survivors of their old poker nights, Terry Cheng, who wants to talk both poker and ...”

“... as a Parliamentary reporter), this sound is frequently counterpointed by a different rhythm: one anonymous early reviewer acutely noted ‘the many delicate remarks which are interspersed among the declamations’. In Hazlitt’s writing we often sense that an emphatic commitment is being played off against a meditative self-consciousness. Hazlitt is a good ...”

“... Here is the other side of the story, from the point of view of the unsung, long-suffering, largely anonymous, patiently serviceable infantry. Some of the leading characters, admittedly, were infantry officers of some eminence. In the page of mug-shots at the end of this book, Sir Warren Fisher, head of the Civil Service and nominally of the Treasury, too, for ...”