“... him. In John Banville’s The Book of Evidence it is an inexplicably entrancing portrait by an anonymous Dutch master which pushes Freddie Montgomery over the edge into homicide. Like Banville, Howard Norman and Katharine Weber write about stealing Dutch paintings, and they share a similar attitude to them. For them, Dutch art represents modesty of ...”

“... recent shift from analysing a few great authors to recovering the experience of otherwise anonymous consumers. Decentring is the order of the day. Yet our resentment at Islington Public Library for prosecuting Joe Orton (his marginal annotations were deemed ‘obscene’) depends on our knowledge that Orton was himself a published writer. Coleridge ...”

“... This Will, which is the pith of my being, is yet absolutely unlike me, as blank and anonymous as the forces that stir the waves. What is now irreparably flawed is subjectivity itself, not just some perversion or estrangement of it. It is what we can least call our own. We are leaving behind the Kantian era of the autonomous, self-fashioning ...”

“... some point in the near but as yet undecided future. Recruitment was supposed to be by means of an anonymous circular email, except it turned out that most MPs hadn’t got the message. The reason they hadn’t got the message is that they were looking in the wrong place: the putative plot was gathering momentum not by spreading its slippery tentacles through ...”

“... by the Guardian as ‘one of the foremost young lions of British hip-lit’. An unsportingly anonymous Londoner, by contrast, sticking their neck out on amazon.co.uk, described Corpsing as ‘a waste of a perfectly good tree’, adding: ‘Penguin should be thoroughly ashamed of itself . . . If this is the future of Brit Lit, gawd help us all.’ Be ...”

“... to make sure that it is from whom it says it is from, and then to stop making it free to send in anonymous bulk. This will make spamming uneconomic, and presto, email will go back to being as straightforwardly useful as it once was. The trouble is, Gates made his prediction/promise about spam on 23 January 2004. Judging by my inbox this morning, three years ...”

“... historical study, is due from Oxford in March. The condition has been dismissed by at least one anonymous ‘notable scientist’ as ‘romantic neurology’, but in the foreword to Synaesthesia, Simon Baron-Cohen says: this book will do much to educate the general public about the important but often overlooked point that we do not all experience this ...”

“... fortune. He continued to struggle financially until the prompting of the popular press and an anonymous letter to Lord Bute led to a pension from the king in 1762. Too poor to complete his Oxford degree though more learned than his tutor, Johnson, like Richard Savage, his friend and the subject of his first biography, ‘having no profession, became by ...”

“... briefly looked like a man of influence. Then came The Shortest Way with Dissenters (1702), an anonymous pamphlet in which Defoe parodied the High Church opponents of religious toleration for Dissenters so well that it was not at first recognised as a parody. He was arrested for this ‘seditious’ publication and was already notorious enough to attract ...”

“... transaction. So: impossible to fake but simple to verify. The entities transferring the money are anonymous, and at the same time completely transparent: anyone can see the bitcoin addresses involved, but nobody necessarily knows to whom they belong. This combination of features has extraordinary power. It means that you can trust the blockchain, while ...”

“... We look into their eyes.’ And they tell us how these photos, almost all of which remain anonymous, have come to acquire meaning:Until recently, a loving male couple, or individuals, had their relationships described, or reported, or narrated by leaders of religious organisations, politicians and the legal system – even though they had never met ...”

“... and unwanted sex. For some people, she adds, this might even be kinky. She begins by quoting an anonymous essay that ran under the initials ‘C.E.’ in an academic journal in 2012. C.E. is tired of their freedom and of the idea that sexual experience brings liberation or empowerment. ‘Work on your shame, perhaps even fight those that shame you, and it ...”

“... On 29 June 1989, a security manager for the US telephone company Indiana Bell received an anonymous telephone call. In a menacing tone a young man’s voice informed him that he had planted bombs in several switching systems known as 5ESSs. ‘They’re set to blow on a national holiday. They could be anywhere in the country – it’s a sort of competition, a security test ...”

“... chosen for his huge book, however, does a grave disservice to his research. It is a collation of anonymous quotations from serving police all over the country on every conceivable subject from their attitudes to black people to how they fare in bed. Certain themes emerge almost in spite of the book. Chief among these appears to be that many of the ...”

“... head. As might be expected, Henderson’s footnotes refer mainly to interviews, most of them anonymous, spreading over his seven years’ experience of writing about Iraqi affairs. Karsh and Rautsi make more use of the literature but for many matters are heavily dependent on a wide variety of press sources. The two books are designed to serve somewhat ...”