“... in a product of the Clarendon Press. The text refers repeatedly to an American poet, otherwise unknown to literary history, named Carlos Williams (he is listed in the index as Carlos Williams, W.). The account of Borges’s story ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ packs three mistakes into as many sentences. Discussing Berio’s Nones, an orchestral work ...”

“... the double act has achieved self-conscious public stardom by way of an indispensable but virtually unknown ghostwriter (Quixote and Sancho, we realise, have never heard of Cide Hamete Benengeli until Cervantes presents his work to them). Quixote was always aware, of course, that knights errant had magical biographers – how else could he have become ...”

“... a mountaineer conquering his own nightmare, he embarked on a two-month personal encounter with the unknown – the working class, who populated his childhood memories as a spectre of fear and loathing. He made a sentimental journey ... amidst the supposedly silent majority, the people excluded from politics who appeared as vagrants on the doorstep of ...”

“... its own distinctive way of dressing and behaving – and also to persecution on a scale hitherto unknown – there existed an extraordinary lack of contact between the myths and symbols of homosexuality and the thing itself. If Bray is right, then King James I had something in common with Meredith Davy. Davy was a Somerset labourer accused in 1630 of having ...”

“... with Lawrence when George Eliot refers to Grandcourt as a ‘handsome lizard of a hitherto unknown species, not of the lively, darting kind’. I am thinking of the passage in The Crown (V) where Lawrence takes the snake and the newt, and reptilian creatures generally, as representing ‘the opposite equivalent of creation’. And it is not for nothing ...”

“... Peter Taylor, to an excellent American fiction of the present time which seems to be virtually unknown in Britain, where feelings of respectful inferiority are commonly produced by other varieties of American writing: this is a fiction which tends to be regional and reclusive in character, and to prefer stories to novels. His opening story tells of a ...”

“... and manufactured by designers with PhDs in botany and chemistry. The acronyms HIV and AIDS were unknown and the only initials to cause anxiety were DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration). The growing voices of America’s neo-conservative movement would later argue that their interpretation of the American Dream, long deferred because of people like Hunter ...”

“... of Aids may relapse into folk wisdom, a fatalistic attitude to a disaster whose causes are unknown. Examples of this are not hard to find in Africa; I attended the opening of a health centre a year or so ago in West Nile Province in the North of Uganda. The four-wheel drive vehicle bearing the District Medical Officer arrived with the slogans of the ...”

“... The non-writing poet at home in the city, scuttling between memory stations, known among the unknown, a clown at the feast. ‘You still spending Christmas with us?’ asks the Sicilian functionary. Corso is last seen, bifocals at the end of his nose, scowling behind a book, as he babysits a deserted bookshop. The owners of that shop are the ones who now ...”

“... still, whatever the tax forms or the critics say. They’re not, like Dave, content to be poor and unknown full-time fathers. They’re angry, depressed and jealous of their wives who both support them and do all the housework. Preparing females to become wives and mothers goes much deeper than the pressures and expectations that steer girls out of science and ...”

“... and autobiography – at the time thought of as a rather presumptuous form for a relatively unknown and female writer to choose – suited what Virginia Woolf called Brittain’s ‘stringy, metallic mind’ better, enabling her lucidly to combine the personal and the political. ‘She feels that these facts must be made known,’ Woolf wrote in her ...”

“... side of herself, the side that ‘belongs’, and calls itself Lulamae Barnes, but something unknown drives her towards a glorious nowhere, a New York, where she might call herself by any name she chooses. That is her small, engaging tragedy. Capote obviously knew girls like that (Carol Marcus, Slim Keith, Marilyn Monroe) but none of them was as much ...”

“... the writer has no particular investment. ‘The persistence of the soul in an unrecognisable form, unknown to itself, without memory, without identity’, as the essayist in Diary of a Bad Year puts it, seems to engage Coetzee’s imagination more than the motifs from the gospels do.As for aridity, it’s true that the new life’s fictive furniture is ...”

“... sheet.More than half the contents of the new edition were first published in 1952 by Julliard. For unknown reasons, Serge’s widow, Laurette Séjourné, insisted that no unpublished material existed. I asked Richard Greeman, his principal translator and founder of the Victor Serge Foundation, what the story was. Séjourné, he explained,had them in her ...”

“... Mack Sennett, screwball comedies and American actresses, who embodied ‘a kind of sex appeal unknown in Europe’. He had been in the US for barely a year before writing: ‘It is no longer a European observer who is making these observations.’ But it wasn’t really so. Kracauer was able to discern the Germanic essence of postwar American film ...”