“... 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 ...”

“... hated Tsar) were actually deported back to the Pale of Settlement. ‘Socialism was practically unknown among British Jews before the 1880s,’ Dr Alderman writes, and although the immigrant Jews often came from Eastern Europe with socialism in their hearts, the socialist movement itself had a very small electoral strength since most of the immigrants could ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... heroine, who is as faceless as Celia herself. I shall try. Women like you are always to be found: unknown, anonymous, taken-for-granted women. There is never a shortage of them. No shortage of children for them either. No end of hope, and of the loss of hope. ‘Women like you’ means of course ‘women like me’, and Jacobson has gently and delicately ...”

“... connections linking Spitalfields market with fertile fields in Essex, the cholera bacillus seeping unknown through both. The Ripper still hovers in the area – his movement caught in ‘the breath of the stones’ – while unearthed shrieks haunt the night. The sites composing Sinclair’s London are various: old plague pits that went on to become the ...”

“... conception of Dr Faustus. The early history of Dr Faustus is skeletal. The date of composition is unknown: some place it quite early in Marlowe’s brief career (c. 1589); others make it his last work, begun in the summer of 1592. A vital factor in the dating is the publication of what was undoubtedly Marlowe’s major source, The Historie of the Damnable ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... has been increased by the monographic loan exhibition and the illustrated art book (both things unknown to the artist), groups of his paintings could be seen, in his own lifetime, in two or three Roman collections, and the atmosphere of the studio must always have been obvious. This is usually regarded as a limitation, as in the modern paintings in the town ...”

“... America: a place where children might play on a vapid afternoon, the sun coming down, the future unknown. I had made the journey: nothing was here. That night I saw Marilyn Monroe’s handprints in the concrete outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Later I joined a queue to see The Seven Year Itch. And no doubt Marilyn was present again: beyond death and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”