“... up to the public gaze. Domination from the air could be practised only when the victims were anonymous, invisible and speechless.’ In its attention to the cultural dimensions of modern warfare, Lindqvist’s book belongs on the same shelf as Way Out There in the Blue, Frances FitzGerald’s brilliant study of Star Wars and the ‘high narrative ...”

“... requested that I drop off their food at the door. Customers grow to love apps that make the worker anonymous.’ In this system, the invisible hand of the market can actually bring you a burrito.By producing​ such extremes of wealth, tech is returning us to a kind of feudalism, with a few powerful figures accountable to no one. Here’s Elon Musk, the ...”

“... the power cut that affected the last day of the festival. Later, a group of anarchists posted an anonymous statement on the website Indymedia announcing that they had sabotaged the region’s main electrical supply. The reasons for their action included Cannes’s participation in ‘culture-washing’; the horror of hosting a glamorous film festival on the ...”

“... like the conceit of someone who takes themselves for God with a laptop: at the same time utterly anonymous and loftily grandiOSe. The Eno documentary uses software – a program called Brain One – to select footage and assemble it on the fly so that a different version is shown each time it is screened. When Eno says ‘since the beginning of the 20th ...”

“... use of disruptive rumours, disinformation, framing loyalists as FBI informants, sexual blackmail, anonymous phone and letter campaigns etc. It was a roaring success: in a year CP membership collapsed from 22,000 to under four thousand (and many even of them were FBI informers). But COINTELPRO was also entirely illegal and represented a new police intrusion ...”

“... it into existence? Women with infertile partners conceive with the help of sperm donors, usually anonymous: that is to say, they have a child with a man they have never set eyes on, who produces a sample of his semen in a cubicle at a clinic, by masturbating over a picture of another total stranger with her legs apart. I suppose I should say I respect their ...”

“... down Great Eastern Street towards Bingles Snack Bar, the kind of place in which he is comfortable, anonymous, stoked up on black coffee; ready to attack the blank pages. The rituals of the day, the pots of tea he brews in his own kitchen (coffee is for travel), the public writing spaces, are important to Drummond. If they become misaligned, if his cover is ...”

“... have a representative, postwar aspect. They pick up Orwellian concerns about society becoming anonymous and mechanically ordered. MacNeice had joined the BBC to do ‘ephemeral work’ but it was invaded by Taylorism, by time-and-motion men doing surveys. This insulted the poet’s freelance spirit and interfered with his visits to the pub. How could a ...”

“... these cases are heard, there is a brief opportunity for the detainee’s lawyer to question an anonymous Security Service witness concealed behind a curtain, before the lawyer is asked to leave the court so it can continue its consideration of secret evidence. The witness was asked: ‘Would you use evidence that was obtained by torture?’ The ...”

“... she knew nothing by comparison. Another described a now defunct online message board where anonymous peers (and, who knows, perhaps also faculty) would speculate about whose dicks women had sucked to get where they were. One of the men alleged to have run the board is still in the discipline. And the women? ‘It’s often your cohort that want to ...”

“... for all time’, this engraving is captioned with an admiring, if rather clumsy couplet from the anonymous Wit’s Recreations: ‘Facetious Middleton, thy witty muse/ Hath pleased all that books or men peruse.’ While similar in shape and dimensions to its Oxford predecessor, the Collected Middleton is even longer and heavier. Although it contains only 29 ...”

“... winning first prize for both poetry and prose in a competition where all the submissions were anonymous. The sexually explicit content of her work provoked establishment outrage: the head of the local cultural bureaucracy spoke of it as an affront to Austrian decency. What her strict Catholic mother thought is not recorded – she had come to Innsbruck as ...”

“... had been carried in slave ships four hundred years earlier. The captor’s humiliation of these anonymous beings – unloaded at Guantánamo Bay, crouched in open cages in orange jumpsuits – was deliberately displayed. The watching world needed no knowledge of international humanitarian conventions to understand that what it was seeing was unlawful, since ...”

“... nature of his disease.’ He looked up the telephone number of Alcoholics Anonymous. Later, he wrote in his journals: ‘Then, my hands shaking, I open the bar and drink the leftover whiskey, gin and vermouth, whatever I can lay my shaking hands on.’ ‘My God, the suburbs!’ Cheever wrote in 1960. ‘They encircled the city’s ...”

“... I cannot place where they come from, seem to me not unpleasant … he might be very good. The anonymous author of “Chant” I would, myself, take to be a far older boy with a taste for Scotch.’The first time I met Karl, at the London Review of Books office in Tavistock Square, it was more than forty years on and he asked me how old I ...”