“... individual workshops and regional variations, and to make educated guesses about portraits of unknown origin. While the dating of some of the panel paintings was once controversial, a rigorous analysis by Barbara Borg, included in summary form at the end of the book, remains the standard interpretation. While some scholars had argued that poorer quality ...”

“... on top of them were Cheshires, Goudas, Edams and numerous varieties of cheese that were entirely unknown to me, some of the largest with bellies slit open and innards exposed. The Roqueforts and Gorgonzolas lewdly flaunted their mould, and a squadron of Camemberts let their pus ooze out freely. An odour of decay wafted from the shop. The book jacket ...”

“... violating vividness in which even a fork is ‘lurid with egg yolk’. In effect, the unknown continent is the Will Self prose style embodied as a landmass. Recherché vocabulary, baroque metaphor and bold cartoonist’s strokes combine with no-nonsense efficiency of narration, as befits a literary road movie. The Butt’s quasi-Aussie argot ...”

“... in the public culture of Europe in the early 21st century. Yet the name of Auguste Comte is unknown to countless people whose daily lives and mental outlook are widely shaped or impinged on by his principles. It was not always thus. Much recent research on the history of social reform and ‘planning’ movements in Britain and Europe before, during and ...”

“... are ‘known unknowns’; the UK is unwilling to retire its nuclear weapon stockpile because of ‘unknown unknowns’. If it is to keep its nuclear weapons as an insurance policy against unknown threats in the future, then co-operation with France seems to be the least worst option. As things stand, both parties in the ...”

“... of known quantities, but the novel asks for something else, something native and essential but unknown. Many fiction-writers, despite what they say, betray a little romance about the question of belonging, as they surely must, otherwise, like the opinion-writer, they will merely know the price of everything and the value of nothing. There may also be, in ...”

“... towards a dubious martyrdom. Sachs starts the book by being so blown to bits that his identity is unknown to all but the informed guesser Aaron, who writes his friendly account, his inside version, against the clock while the FBI try to put their official case-report together. Although a good deal has been made of the novelty of political subject-matter for ...”

“... of yellow wall painted with so much skill and refinement by an artist destined to be for ever unknown and barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world based on kindness, scrupulousness, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one and ...”

“... are interdependent, saming is more characteristic of the medieval encounter with the unfamiliar or unknown. Its face is the more friendly and generous of the two, especially in the admirably benign Chaucer; but this is not to say that it is less telling, or less oppressive, in its final effects. One of the great ‘samers’ of the later Middle Ages was the ...”

“... about. There is something soft and messy about such people.’ Sarah Ferguson was previously quite unknown to me, but this passage from a book called A Guard Within (1973) is one of the 450 or so literary specimens to be found in this curious anthology. The spunky, philistine tone of Sarah Ferguson’s outburst (one wonders how she was driven to it) makes it ...”

“... for some future attempt on the summit’. The range of his thought was a ‘vast and virtually unknown country’. His Abor Scientiae was a ‘forest of trees’ into which she intended ‘to force a way’. She conducted her explorations with a genuine missionary passion. She spoke, characteristically, of being ‘electrified’ when she saw an ...”

“... forward into a pane of glass and dying instantly on the pavement (An Awfully Big Adventure); an unknown man staggering towards the narrator, to die in his arms (Every Man for Himself). Sometimes these episodes turned out to be significant; sometimes they were allowed to drop away altogether. In the same way, remarkable coincidences surfaced, but they tended ...”

“... the primary significance of poverty in ‘social exclusion’. This view, again, is not unknown in the Labour Party, though few in the past have expressed it as brazenly as some members of the present government. Again, there are a few simple lessons we should not have to relearn. It need not surprise anyone, for instance, that the Government’s ...”

“... book presented us with an unmissable PR challenge: to get attention for a novel by a relatively unknown author of adult fiction with a relatively unknown publishing house. We had an immediate sense that this was going to be something special, and knew that if we held the courage of our convictions, the media would respond ...”

“... puts him in a unique class. As he tells us in his earlier volume, The Auto biography of an Unknown Indian, his first love was for military history, and lying on his charpoy in the family house among the paddy fields he mastered the tactics of every battle from those of Hannibal to Tsushima and the siege of Port Arthur by the Japanese. He devoured every ...”