“... 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 ...”

“... Christopher, is one of the most celebrated of America’s younger poets but – I suspect – an unknown figure in England, at least as a poet (his novel, The Soloist, was published by Pan last year). In each case, this disparity in reputation – this failure, or at least delay, in the gaining of a transatlantic reputation – would seem, on the face of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... administrés. The encounter, if fortuitous, was far from accidental, however. A biography of an unknown man, who left no deliberate record and never did anything that mattered, is a bold and original undertaking. Corbin has made bold originality his speciality. Most historians would be happy to write a single truly pioneering book; he manages one every few ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... an audience has increasingly depended on a poet’s willingness to do so, has kept him relatively unknown. This neglect is the more understandable given Fisher’s publication history. Many of his early pieces were circulated in fugitive pamphlets. Like the Collected Poems of 1968, the superbly crafted Matrix (1971) was published by Fulcrum Press – a ...”

“... imagination as the garden, and the imagination has already been everywhere, has already shaped the unknown into the form of knowledge we call the ‘unknown’. The difficulty with this argument, as a nail to hang a series on, is not that it’s controversial but that it’s impossible to controvert, so it was just as ...”

“... solely because the game was developed in England’. Obviously affronted by the suggestion, an unknown antebellum songwriter, who apparently played baseball either for the Excelsiors or for the New York Knickerbockers, penned a 17-verse song popular in bars and at the elaborate post-game dinners hosted by the home club. The first and last verses of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... extensively reported in the press. Around a dozen of them became major news stories and it was not unknown for the Times to devote an entire issue to a case. Though the commission potentially offered a means to reassert control over family property, it also involved washing dirty linen in public, with the attendant risk that the alleged lunatic might find ...”

“... massive and challenging achievement behind him and the devotion of an active British publisher, is unknown not only to general readers but to those who think they know about modern poetry. To be strictly accurate, Peck is not a card-carrying Poundian – such poets tend to be tiresome – but there are several points of convergence. He resembles Pound in the ...”