“... 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 ...”

“... individual act, like a rebellious angel choosing to rise against God, and a more passive or anonymous process, a destiny, like the rise of the Dutch Republic or self-publishing. ‘Rise like lions after slumber/In unvanquishable number,’ the working people of England are advised in ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, the dream-vision Shelley wrote in outrage ...”

“... one investigator recorded, was 22 per 1000, much higher than the London average. Quoting an anonymous interviewee, he drew attention to the ‘disgraceful meanness’ of Lord Allington, who owned the whole parish and ‘drew £20,000 from the neighbourhood’.After the Jack the Ripper murders of the autumn of 1888 the East End, and Whitechapel in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... old, sweet, darling mob. My good old London mob.’ As his invented (or reinvented) revenants and anonymous extras vanish from Tower Bridge, a crush of real literary masks, PR folk, media flotsam, Dome apologists brush past them, waving their invitation cards for the launch of Ackroyd’s heritage blockbuster. If they turn to gaze down at the black waters of ...”

“... years later of Princess Margaret Tudor to James IV. ‘London thow art of Towynys A per se’, an anonymous poem, is said in one surviving manuscript copy to have been delivered at a dinner held by the Lord Mayor during the Christmas festivities that accompanied this visit, by ‘a Scottysh preyst sytting at oon of the syde tablys’. The poem is lavish in ...”

“... lawyers didn’t manage to find out much in the open sessions. Consider this exchange between the anonymous Home Office witness known as Witness B – a member of the security services – and Abu Rideh’s barrister, Ben Emmerson QC: Witness B: So far as the open assertion is concerned, it is that he was involved in the facilitation of travel to training ...”

“... star waned accordingly, though he continued to publish prolifically in the 1990s. The words of an anonymous peer reviewer of an essay by Hill (more fruitful sleuthing by Braddick) capture the unsympathetic reception of much of his later work: ‘There is a sweep and scope to the article … Unfortunately there is a massive rehearsal of material discussed ...”

“... her book, or the rich black intersection of St John of the Cross or the pyroclastic whisper of Anonymous, Unknown Author. Or something a little closer to home – Jeannie, for instance, the family friend whom my father (a Catholic priest in full cassock) calls simply a Eucharistic mystic, so guilelessly, and with such evident trust, that he does not even ...”

“... and financial greed. Rochester used this method extensively. One of his nastiest images is of an anonymous ‘Whore’ who is all vagina: ‘You might find in every pore/A well stuck standing Prick.’ A satire on Charles centres on the royal penis, ‘the prowdest peremptory Prick alive’, which governs him and, in turn, via his mistresses, the whole ...”

“... Lesotho, the British made mining one of the few careers available to the Basotho people. In an anonymous poem from 1998, a young man describes crossing the river to South Africa in search of work in the mines. Cannibals (lelimo) are waiting for him. According to the historian David Coplan, lelimo referred to the earth into which you descended as well as to ...”

“... of money and be very noticeable, or have the same value strapped to your wrist, and be completely anonymous.’ All this is invisible to the modern AML apparatus, which is focused on money that moves through the official financial system. ‘Trade-based money laundering’ follows a similar pattern. Bullough gives the example of a Mexican drug dealer who ...”

“... loved. The result is a provocative study, if much less salacious than the title (taken from an anonymous joke of 1623) suggests. Jackson and Russell both consider the entirety of James’s long reign: nearly 58 years as king of Scotland and 22 years as king of England and Ireland. Both move evenly between Scotland and England. James, who called himself a ...”

“... 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 ...”