“... of these books and pamphlets being trusted to the postal service, as gifts to peers, known and unknown. News had a frontier quality, coming in on the railway (in my case the clapped-out North London Line between Dalston Junction and Camden Road, for the great souk of Compendium Books). Control of production kept the process well away from corporate ...”

“... involves being both incredibly, outlandishly famous by serious-writer standards while also being unknown to the general reader, is the fact that Stephenson works in the area of SF and fantasy writing. For reasons I’ve never seen explained or even thoroughly engaged with, there seems to be an unbridgeable crevasse between the SF/fantasy audience and the ...”

“... tears to shed for the losers. ‘I confess to having little compassion for the toiling masses of unknown men, whose lives are mired in misery and pain.’ He attributes this to the terrible strains his mother’s long-term insanity had placed on her only son. ‘I sometimes feel that each of us is born with a measure of compassion, which is easily exhausted ...”

“... that a person has died a violent or unnatural death, or when someone has died suddenly of an unknown cause, or died in prison or in circumstances such as to require an inquest under any other act, then the coroner must hold an inquest as soon as it is practicable. A jury may or may not be summoned, but either way the inquest must decide, first, who the ...”

“... guns but the increasing number of accidents. How much time Kathleen Raine spent at Sandaig is also unknown, because she threw her diaries into a river, and when he came to write his book, Maxwell excised her, though ‘ring of bright water’ was her line – the most famous one she ever wrote. Her poem, without a title or her name, appears as the book’s ...”

“... Xenophon’s story of Greek squaddies forced to quit Persia for home as best they could, via the unknown terrain of Black Sea Asia. On the way, they encounter the same sacred mystery as Herodotus: humanity’s preposterous variousness, the substance and the salt of being. This global route away from common or species universality has been a non-stop ...”

“... stylistic – can be and have been drawn out at length; it has to be extended to cover epochs unknown to him, or alien, or inimical, or (inevitably) subsequent. But its golden core ensures Tovey’s permanent place as one of the greatest of all writers on music. And because his more accessible work, despite a tincture of jocularity and oracularity, never ...”

“... on the Folio – changing the name of the heroine of Cymbeline on the grounds that the hitherto unknown name ‘Imogen’ must have been a misprint for ‘Innogen’, used by Shakespeare elsewhere – is inherited from that edition.) Oxford’s general editors, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, decided that, instead of trying to reproduce Shakespeare’s texts ...”

“... 1976 and 1977, if we were honest (and Karl was more honest than me), were The Defenders, Omega the Unknown and Howard the Duck, all written by a mad genius called Steve Gerber, and Captain Marvel and Warlock, both written and drawn by another auteur briefly in fashion, Jim Starlin. As far as the art went, Gerber liked to collaborate with plodding but ...”

“... angrily: I resist anyway the idea that we are all a collection of usable parts, and that someone unknown to us can decide how to take us apart and redistribute us. It’s a mechanistic rather than a humanistic view . . . It is not like putting a new element in an old stove. Sharp has a lot to say about this sensibility. Strange Harvest is almost entirely ...”

“... and reefs. On the first day, for instance, off Cannes, he tells the extraordinary (and to me unknown) story of Paganini’s burial. The great violinist had died of cholera in 1840, and his corpse was being taken home to Genoa by his son. But the Genoese declined to let the body ashore for fear of infection, a refusal repeated at Marseille, and then at ...”

“... much simpler. In 1926, Fowler listed the various ways to end a proper letter: Yours faithfully: To unknown person on business. Yours truly: To slight acquaintance. Yours very truly: Ceremonious but cordial. Yours sincerely: In invitations & friendly but not intimate letters. But that didn’t solve every dilemma. In an age of ritualised courtship and ...”

“... not hide it,’ Gustave’s friend Maxime Du Camp wrote. ‘He was bewildered, as if faced with an unknown pathological case.’ Pathological is what the situation soon became. Driving a coach with his brother in January 1844, Flaubert ‘fell, as if struck with apoplexy … and for ten minutes [Achille] thought I was dead.’ It was the first of many nervous ...”

“... truth, our shared sentence: ‘I shall be dead.’ The poet A.E. Stallings faces up to the unknown in a more tender voice in ‘Another Bedtime Story’: The tales that start with once and end with ever after, All, all of the stories are about going to bed, About coming to terms with the night, alleviating the dread Of laying the body down, of lying ...”

“... For the most part, though, this edition does a great service in bringing an almost entirely unknown text to life, and allowing a very particular 18th-century voice – unpolished, unmannerly, thoroughly impolite – to ...”