“... deceitfulness or cowardly malice. Where possible, he has inserted the names of the authors of anonymous pamphlets: future victims fingered. There are writers who claim, with various degrees of credibility, not to read their critics. Pope was candidly addicted to the outpourings of his. He collected their work because he was out to take possession of ...”

“... lumps outa her wee shop. The chough’s cry is clear and abrupt, not warm and joyous like this anonymous song out of oral tradition. I never catch a glimpse of the chough, but I do see a brown kestrel swoop out of the fir trees – a moment of slightly sinister authority before it disappears. Trout jump, and time – well, a couple of hours – passes with ...”

“... difficulty, including the very large sum of £300 from de Quincey, who wished to keep the gift anonymous. De Quincey was different. He became a tramp, uncushioned by private finance, a man who knew how to sleep in fields, how to keep dry in the winds and rains of mountain walking. And, for such a traveller, there was only one real place to aim for: that ...”

“... Dekker and Middleton’s The Honest Whore, Rowley’s A New Wonder, A Woman Never Vexed, or the anonymous Fair Em – neither make an appearance nor seem to have formed part of the author’s background reading. Equally distorting are Lisa Jardine’s highly selective and inaccurate accounts of the plays with which she does deal. It is not really very ...”

“... wit, most exquisite learning, and sweet conditions’. When we read Camden we can sense why an anonymous diarist should have noted of Sidney’s death that ‘the very hope of our age seemeth to be utterly extinguished in him.’ Duncan-Jones favours psychological explanations of Sidney’s conduct and writings. She traces a series of correspondences ...”

“... involved himself in the assassination of a single named individual rather than the slaughter of anonymous thousands. His jocular remark on this occasion – ‘I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible’ – suggests he may have been having the best of times. Another occasion of his intimate involvement ...”

“... not like them; but is any King a Whig?’ The Lives are indeed a Tory work, and there was soon an anonymous ‘furious fellow’ protesting in print against Johnson’s Life of Milton. No Whig could wholeheartedly like most of Johnson’s writings. He was a Tory thinker from his first appearances in print. In his early work for the Gentleman’s ...”

“... Herculon upholstery and dark, stainguard carpet’ of homes with children have in common with the anonymous working-class woman who in an eloquent letter to the Independent in 1907 wrote that she and her husband refused to ‘breed food’ for the factories of the ruling class? Both women are ‘childless by choice’, but the meaning of the choice is ...”

“... in on the credits: Syndicate International, Rex Features, Halifax Photos Ltd, Mirror Features. Anonymous craftsmen who were sharp enough to walk out of the clubs with their film unconfiscated. (Anything untoward was immediately snatched by the minders.) David Bailey was the only authorised scruff. He was famous enough to dress like a slob: tennis ...”

“... it off, and says ‘many observers’ have found the pose ‘clearly post-coital’. The figure is anonymous, because the head is cut off, so to speak, by the brick wall and the angle of vision allowed by the holes in the door. No matter how you squint and change your position, you can’t see a face, only a hank of blonde hair. The body is lying on an ...”

“... it. To put the phenomenon into perspective, one needs to remember that denunciations were seldom anonymous and that often they were a complaint about a state of affairs, rather than an individual. And these denunciations arose from a society far more open and public than any we can imagine, where neighbours policed bad marriages and contained violent ...”

“... service. She also announced a consultation into decriminalising non-payment of the TV licence. Anonymous briefings – which may as well have been signed ‘D. Cummings’ – appeared in the weekend papers promising to ‘whack’ the BBC, to end the licence fee and gut its output. The renewal of the BBC charter, which takes place once a decade, isn’t ...”

“... the butler’s measured plod as he bears the precious cargo of wine or port to the table. This anonymous figure is almost certainly Doyle’s depiction of Francis Barber – Dr Johnson’s ‘faithful negro servant’, as Boswell calls him. We cannot be quite sure, because Reynolds himself had a black servant, but he was a good deal younger and less ...”

“... particular delicacy of the scene in The Shop around the Corner where she reads the letter from her anonymous correspondent, and Stewart, its author, watches and waits, yearning to tell the truth but playing as ever by the rules. It is a subtle moment of earnest empathy and awkward self-consciousness – genuine, utterly real, easy to pass by. One cannot easily ...”

“... and simultaneously brought in a regime of unannounced factory inspections combined with anonymous, off-site interviews with workers, it would probably do more to change the working conditions in Third World sweatshops than any government on the planet. That, though, is the problem. Wal-Mart stretches far beyond the reach of any ...”