“... best anthology I know of’. ‘I wish I were Mr Anon,’ de la Mare once remarked in a letter, ‘unknown, beloved, perennial, ubiquitous, in that very wide shady hat of his and dark dwelling eyes’. While the nonsense verse of Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear or Stevie Smith is always immediately identifiable, de la Mare’s rhymes often seem both to aim at and ...”

“... situation is taken to be, not ‘is this by Middleton or Ford?’, but ‘is this by Defoe or an unknown?’ (or, as the authors put it, ‘Defoe against the world’). That this is an exaggeration, albeit an exaggeration of a real difference, is shown by the work which has been done to assign Defoe attributions to other known writers of the period. I cannot ...”

“... the intense pleasure of the occasion: ‘The feeling of being alone in the midst of a vast crowd, unknown to everyone, sheltered from all curious eyes, surrounded by people from whom we wanted to hide, and separated from them by a fragile and yet invincible barrier, this way of living uniquely for one another, amidst these waves of the multitude, seemed to us ...”

“... portfolio at the Foreign Office in 1960: ‘His views on this vital aspect of UK policy are unknown and he has never had a chance to show in public whether he has any.’ Heath warmed to his task. He was dubbed ‘Mr Europe’ when Britain’s application to join the European Community was announced in August 1961. He lived up to the name, pressing ...”

“... There is the ethnologist Marcel Appenzzell who pursues for five years and 11 months an unknown tribe of Sumatrans without getting them once to acknowledge his existence; there is the domino-playing hamster Polonius; there is Cinoc, the word-killer, who is hired by Larousse to diagnose obsolete words and eliminate them from the dictionary but ...”

“... of carrying the child: She longs to fold to her maternal breast Part of herself, yet to herself unknown; To see and to salute the stranger guest, Fed with her life through many a tedious moon. The quatrain stanza is used here to reflect, and to reflect upon, the interfolding of the mother and her womb-child, their own relation an intimate paradox of the ...”

“... religious, somewhat morbid. The Stanleys were high-spirited, free-thinking extroverts. Shyness was unknown among them,’ and goes on to quote Russell’s reflections on his genetic heritage: My brother, who had the Stanley temperament, loved the Stanleys and hated the Russells. I loved the Russells and feared the Stanleys. As I have grown older, however, my ...”

“... hone the effects of a joke. How many writers, however lonely and bored, would bother to ask some unknown American admirer to stay in their house for the weekend, simply in order to tease them? But this is what Waugh heroically did to Mr Paul Moor. After Moor had been ushered over the threshold by Waugh’s butler (the date is 1949, when outside the pages of ...”

“... our Castilian language,’ and contemptuously reproached his flock for maintaining their ‘rough, unknown tongues’. But even these accommodations to Madrid availed very little. In 1795 clerics accused of grave offences were assigned to the jurisdiction of civil courts. In 1803, a royal decree ordered the sale of all Church property in Nueva España, with ...”

“... Ulisse is an Odysseus turned inside out, one who in old age longs only to venture out upon unknown seas. But, most clamorously of all, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, his one play about America, demands to be included, from the first, idyllic phase in which Caliban is taught to speak, and is shown the Man in the Moon, to the attempted rape of Miranda and ...”

“... Charles Vickery (who has always been known about as a birth-control campaigner) and the hitherto unknown George Vickery. The couple eventually let it be understood that they were married by starting to cohabit in 1895, but at any stage the truth could have been a deadly weapon for enemies of Alice Vickery the pioneer of women’s medical training, or of ...”

“... recoils when he is invited to join a cause: ‘to yield was to cease to be myself, to trust to the unknown.’ For such a man, any regulated state of affairs will be preferable to the chaos which results from an attempt to change things for the better. There is, then, a tension in A Way in the World between the intellectual force of Naipaul’s vision and the ...”

“... and inflects the worlds around him. Kelman wants to characterise the political antagonisms, the unknown powers, which oppress Sammy, but he can’t come near to doing it convincingly, since Sammy’s mysterious opponents are not people, not in the way he is; they are not from Glasgow or from anywhere else. They are deadening, posh-sounding ...”

“... at the end of the Twenties. What Bakhtin – or Bakhtin/Medvedev, because the book was to some unknown degree collaborative – thought was wrong in Formalism was its insistence that literary language was somehow peculiar to literature. Formalists went in joyful pursuit of what Jakobson, I think, was the first to call ‘literariness’, or that peculiar ...”

“... all that we know. The impossible is that gritstone prow my arms will never haul my body over, the unknown is the foothold waiting round the blind arete in heavy cloud, space is the void between your heels and the backs of pigeons skimming the larchtops a hundred feet below, effort is the squirming of muscles round your nose and upper lip as you strive to get ...”