Ten-Foot Chopsticks

James Meek: The North-East Transition, 4 December 2025

... strike, this didn’t just take the form of clashes between police, scabs and pickets, or anonymous death threats. Egged on by his older brothers, the seven-year-old Aiden Campbell became the leader of a group of strikers’ sons in his primary school class, getting into fights with the scabs’ children. He’s embarrassed about it now; he says the ...

Bites from the Bearded Crocodile

G. Cabrera Infante, 4 June 1981

... indignity meted out to Padilla. They didn’t, of course, say how many unknown workers and anonymous peasants had been forced to do the same all over Cuba in the past (since the inception of the Revolution, in fact) and how many more will one day find, in corpore, that Padilla’s public recanting was no cruel and unusual punishment but a confession ...

The Satoshi Affair

Andrew O’Hagan, 30 June 2016

... the story that he was trying to escape. Within hours of Wright’s name appearing in the press, anonymous messages threatened to reveal his ‘actual history’. Some said he had been on Ashley Madison, the website that sets up extramarital affairs, others that he’d been seen on Grindr, the gay hook-up app. During a six-hour layover in Hong Kong, he ...

You Muddy Fools

Dan Jacobson: In the months before his death Ian Hamilton talked about himself to Dan Jacobson, 14 January 2002

... the TLS I was in charge of also bear witness to much of was I up to. Remember that the TLS was all anonymous in those days. I think my record will stand up. At that time my feelings were so vehement . . . I was in my twenties. That sort of fervour began to dissipate a bit later.It’s interesting that the vehemence you speak of, which started with your ...

The Price of Safety

Clair Wills: Constance Marten’s Defiance, 14 August 2025

... before he escaped out of a window. None of the neighbours identified Gordon, but following an anonymous phone call, detectives started visiting the house he shared with his brother. On the third visit, Gordon told them: ‘I was in her house.’ He was taken to the police station, where he made a taped confession. Many of the details in his confession ...

The Uncommon Reader

Alan Bennett, 8 March 2007

... mingled unrecognised with the crowds. There was something of that, she felt, to reading. It was anonymous; it was shared; it was common. And she who had led a life apart now found that she craved it. Here in these pages and between these covers she could go unrecognised. These doubts and self-questionings, though, were just the beginning. Once she got into ...