“... reason – to pass passionately along the wire, so becoming for a moment the very nerve of some unknown other room, place or country. It’s been instructive to reread her fiction at a time of renewed attention to the Internet Novel as a distinct subgenre. Bowen certainly imagined the telephone as a social medium. In To the North, Cecilia, returning from a ...”

“... my mother-in-law had to come to help with the children. Repetition-compulsion is, of course, not unknown in Freudian psychology: one returns to the scene of the crime in order to do again the thing which had initially brought one down; the irrational reasoning behind this is that one acts in order to wipe out the first offence by replacing it with a new ...”

“... Cambridge: drinking wine, eating Gruyère alone in a café, he feels ‘ready for anything’. Unknown to him, however, and wholly unsuspected, a scream is slowly but steadily approaching: It resembles a white mask with spread fingers That will grab and drub and wring his heart Like a bandage impossible to clean. A scream Resembling a nuclear melt-down ...”

“... early poem, Miss Maniac confesses that, having been exiled from her home, she became ‘lost in unknown agony’ and ‘laughed as if in mirth’. Everywhere in Lear you sense a connection between damage and merriment, a taste for the comic as a kind of frantic fun. When he describes the Old Person of Chili ‘whose conduct was painful and silly’, the ...”

“... into it, but he can’t write it’) and as being an act of will: ‘The shape the novel takes is unknown, since the author at some early point refused to enter into it and lead it forward.’ The distance between the two texts, the unexcavated novel and the footnotes, is sometimes expressed in lateral terms (with the novel ‘over there’ and the footnotes ...”

“... finance, it’s strikingly profligate. Mining was the way bitcoin’s original designer, the unknown figure who goes by the name Satoshi Nakamoto, sought to solve the basic problem of any electronic currency: how to make sure that a user doesn’t spend the same unit of currency more than once.1 Since the vast majority of pounds, dollars and euros are ...”

“... the emotions have been aroused – a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and the unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love – then we wish for knowledge about the object of our emotional response. Once found, it has lasting meaning.’ In love now with the sea, Carson set aside her dreams of being a writer. She did graduate ...”

“... whose work between the 14th and the 16th centuries, written in the Malayalam language, remained unknown until the second half of the 20th. Or take chess, the excessive practice of which was actively discouraged by religious authority in general and Maimonides in particular as a distraction from the study of the Law. No wonder the first Jewish chess player ...”

“... ignored them. Exactly what he was writing and why he had gone to ground, keeping silent, are both unknown. He told Carmichael the letters were probably from tradesmen hoping to get payment on a bill, but it is clear that his family and Cora Taylor in England were both desperate for word, and that Crane knew it. His silence was deliberate, prompted by ...”

“... bits of it within reach. For a while I think I have grown a new line on one of my hands, a line unknown to palmistry. I think perhaps I have a new fate. But it proves to be a medical artefact, a puckering of the skin produced by one of the tubes sewn into my wrist. We call those ‘lines’, too. The iambic pentameter of the saline stand, the alexandrine of ...”

“... Sticks’, the blank being filled by an engraving of a foot (believed to be the work of the as yet unknown cartoonist Thomas Rowlandson). Foote’s response to all this was predictable. He began proceedings to sue the Ledger for libel, and put on a play called The Capuchin, a rewrite of the previously banned Chudleigh satire, which was no longer sub ...”

“... an inspiration. The potter Grayson Perry’s recent British Museum exhibition, The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, offers a vivid case of the metamorphosis I am describing. He chose from the museum’s extraordinary collections an extraordinary array of objects, in order to explore the ways cultures have tapped the sacred through images, ritual ...”

“... that Mavis seems to have invented for the three of us (me, my sister and herself) for reasons unknown. Honorifics one might call them, or perhaps, horrorifics. Now I should explain that in my mother’s eyes our all-female trio has always constituted the primordial family unit. Nor can she really be gainsaid on this point. The basic triad was established ...”

“... dropout selling cheap records from his store in Oxford Street, before he signed up the unknown Mike Oldfield and built a record label on the astonishing success of Oldfield’s first album, Tubular Bells. In his own mind he is a creative free spirit, and that seems to be how much of the British press and public sees him too. But in reality, he and ...”

“... either side. In both cases, the presence of international forces and international assistance, of unknown duration, introduces uncertainty into the political marketplace, which makes a solution more difficult, not less. Elsewhere, international engagement is either intended to weaken a government, or has the effect of bidding up the price of the ...”