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“... 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 ...”

“... cityscape outside his window): by the time she wrote ‘Requiem’ and he wrote ‘Lines on an Unknown Soldier’, both formally innovative and both concerned with recording the voices of the lost, they had been forced into a Modernism commensurate with their experiences, into responding to what they couldn’t avoid. Gumilev, unlike his more famous ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he was not much involved) is Don Carlos, which is now routinely heard with whole swathes of music unknown to most of the 20th century. Elsewhere, Verdi’s desire to control the details of his musical text means that there are fewer surprises, but even a work as well known as Rigoletto can boast fresh configurations in its new, critical edition. For a century ...”

“... 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 ...”