“... 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 ...”

“... for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to Earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun – almost as hot as it is here today – and do all this, and do it ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the earlier days of British light entertainment and pop music and television, this was a hidden, unknown process, where worlds of dissociation and distraction engulfed young people before they knew what was happening to them, and the journey through famousness for someone like the singer Lena Zavaroni seems to me an entirely different order of drama, a ...”

“... In the real-life Soviet Union of the 1930s, however, ‘family’ denunciations, though not unknown, seem to have been comparatively rare. This was no doubt largely because of the dangers they posed: at peak periods for denunciations, to denounce a family member as an ‘enemy of the people’ put the entire family at risk of the Gulag or death. There ...”

“... Grand St Bernard Pass. Matthew Paris lamented that ‘the English nobility was being given away to unknown immigrants,’ and that Boniface was an illiterate bruiser as well as a foreigner, ‘more suited to warlike than to spiritual affairs’. Paris also claimed that Boniface strode into St Bartholomew’s Priory wearing armour under his vestments and threw ...”

“... or the rich black intersection of St John of the Cross or the pyroclastic whisper of Anonymous, Unknown Author. Or something a little closer to home – Jeannie, for instance, the family friend whom my father (a Catholic priest in full cassock) calls simply a Eucharistic mystic, so guilelessly, and with such evident trust, that he does not even realise it ...”

“... this book, rich with extraordinary narrative and acute opinion, is to enter a region mercifully unknown to Britain. This is the dark landscape of enemy occupation, a moral blackout of hidden pitfalls and lethal morasses. A Resistance fighter emerges from the sewers, only to find that his unit has been ‘turned’ and that he has been working as a ...”

“... not because they are familiar. History is produced by the oscillation between the known and the unknown: some of the very strangest things are those that seem, at first glance, to be easily recognisable.Taxation, for example, was in the 13th century a bewildering array of levies demanded by kings: dona and auxilia, tallage and scutage, purveyance and ...”

“... a ‘form of inquiry’, Samuel wrote in the LRB of 14 June 1990, history is a ‘journey into the unknown’. These essays suggest how keenly he felt this to be true.In​ 1880 Britain could with some justification be called the ‘workshop of the world’: it produced more than 20 per cent of global industrial output and about 40 per cent of the world’s ...”

“... who knew of a young man who had fallen under his spell. At that point Tate was still relatively unknown, although he was already skilled at acquiring followers by generating a particular kind of internet pile-on. In 2017, he responded to a comic book artist who was raising money for his son’s operation by tweeting: ‘Do you feel like a failure that the ...”

“... confirmed (in Pico’s case, through a toenail), though the identity of their murderer remains unknown. Pico died burning up with fever; bundles of unintelligible notes were found stuffed in his cabinets. He had spent the last two years of his life lashing his flesh under Savonarola’s eyes.Pico’s life touched much of what made the Renaissance the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”