“... the photos show boxy 1970s cars parked in the background – a peculiarly depressing sight – and anonymous male tourists with period comb-overs and long sideburns. I bought my second-hand copy through the mail from a military book dealer in Dorset and its once-glossy pages reek of must and damp.My own war fixation is equally grim and spinsterish; its roots ...”

“... House signed a letter criticising Dean’s remarks, and the Chicago Jewish Star reported that ‘anonymous attackers … are clogging the email inboxes of Jewish leaders around the country, warning – without much evidence – that Dean would somehow be bad for Israel.’ This worry was absurd; Dean is in fact quite hawkish on Israel: his campaign co-chair ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”