“... God, or Apple, or Freud. To them, life is a drama in which power rubs out one’s name; they are anonymous, ghosts in the machine, infiltrating and weakening the structures of the state and partying as they do so, causing havoc, encrypting who they are. When the FBI attacks Silk Road and attempts to shut it down, as it did most recently two months ago, on 5 ...”

“... might describe as ‘poetic’, but that was much less likely on a newspaper that had made the anonymous Insight team one of its star attractions. Around 7 or 8 p.m. every Saturday night, after our first edition had gone to press, messengers would deliver the first editions of our Sunday rivals to the news editor’s desk, where the night staff would go ...”

“... of the vanished Railway Clearing House, Bradley writes: The lost routines of the thousands of anonymous clerks at Eversholt Street – the endless, patient exactions of mental arithmetic in fractions and non-decimal units, even the neat copperplate writing – seem almost beyond the powers of the modern desk-worker. The same goes for the endurance and ...”

“... limp (after a misdiagnosed childhood illness). She never talked about it, except possibly in her anonymous antiwar ‘Junius Pamphlet’, smuggled out of prison in 1915, where, in attacking the war for reducing the labouring population to the ‘aged, the women, the maimed’ she may be invoking an older image of herself. She never belonged. ‘A severe ...”

“... production can’t disguise. Diamonds and Pearls is Prince-lite, assembled by a new cast of anonymous musicians, perfectly adequate professionals who would never surprise him (or us), and weren’t in any position, as the now exiled Revolution had been, to demand their part in a genuine collaboration.The very thing that many of us thought was Prince’s ...”

“... killed 52,000 in Britain alone. ‘Our other plagues were home-bred, and part of ourselves,’ an anonymous English doctor wrote:We had a habit of looking on them with a fatal indifference, indeed, inasmuch as it led us to believe that they could be effectually subdued. But the cholera was something outlandish, unknown, monstrous; its tremendous ravages, so ...”

“... devices, the Independent Commission against Corruption, which solicits and follows up anonymous tip-offs by mail and telephone; Venetians were motivated by cash rewards to slip the names of bribe-takers into the mouth of a stone lion located (for privacy) behind St Mark’s Cathedral. And, like Venice, a major source of economic strength lies not ...”

“... them down. The New Testament seems by contrast the least convincing of all the holy books, full of anonymous pseudonymous texts by who knows who, from who knows where, written who knows when: forged Letters of Jesus’ Brothers, ‘of James’, ‘of Jude, brother of James’, ‘of Paul’ and ‘of Peter’, who seems to have found time between fishing trips ...”

“... to Beckett because of its dense texture and its deep simplicity. The painting was bought from an anonymous dealer in 1996 by the National Gallery of Ireland, which is not far from the studio where it was painted, and it hung in the gallery’s show Samuel Beckett: A Passion for Paintings, which marked the centenary of Beckett’s birth last year. Its ...”

“... there are hands from different parties involved who want to decide on behalf of the Syrians.’ Anonymous sources told Al Jazeera that al-Khatib was not a ‘team player’. In January, without consultation, he had publicly offered to negotiate with the Syrian government. Presumably he believed his colleagues would dissuade him and so presented them with a ...”

“... with used condoms. ‘You are now under surveillance and two of your associates know it,’ an anonymous correspondent wrote to him. ‘Don’t think you’re too small for this. Look for cameras – you won’t find them.’ Informants at Princeton, Columbia and the Harvard alumni office assisted the FBI in an investigation that examined his banking and ...”

“... the seducer’s arms.’ Later, Roudinesco switches to the referee mode, faulting Lacan for making anonymous use of an anecdote about Derrida’s son Pierre that the philosopher told Lacan at a dinner in Paris a year after the Baltimore conference: ‘Lacan’s role in the affair was not a good one, and Derrida felt wounded. Understandably so.’ She then ...”

“... instruction? Why? Were they constructing postal buildings in 1979, or postal castles? Was the anonymous official, perhaps, the same person who wrote instruction number N02F0024, ‘Vocabulary of Grey Uniform with Corresponding Outer Clothing’, or declared in instruction K07B0400, ‘Clocks’, that ‘Clocks should be provided in cloakrooms that serve ...”

“... to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars – to be part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording – all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery … I want to talk to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to ...”

“... Kathleen Stock, who was then a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex, was led by an anonymous student activist group called Anti Terf Sussex. Launched on Instagram, the campaign was a horrific spectacle, involving vague threats (‘Our demand is simple: fire Kathleen Stock. Until then, you’ll see us around’), consumerist entitlement (one ...”