“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... narrating them’. But we are bound to fail: we ‘live our lives in one direction’ (towards an unknown future) and ‘narrate them the other way round’ (as if we knew how they would end). Sartre worked on ‘Melancholia’ for several years, transforming it from an abstract philosophical essay into a well-wrought novella, whose message is built into its ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Monkey Grip, published in 1977, sold well and won a national award in Australia, so she was not unknown, just rejected by the anthologists who anyway preferred poets. When I look at the contents page, I find that, of 38 names listed under ‘Contemporary Writing’, eight are women. Among the male names I do not recognise (my bad), one is a judge-poet and ...”

“... German administrator would have to go. To them this meant losing an able man and accepting an unknown quantity. The Oberpraesident of Schleswig-Holstein was sacked. But we could also point to men who had for years been forbidden by the Nazis to hold office and who proved to be able administrators. The Oberpraesident of Niedersachsen turned out to be an ...”

“... first time. McGann’s edition of the poetry also contains some poems which were previously either unknown or not identified as Byron’s. But its more significant contribution is to make available passages, either from the poems or from Byron’s or Hobhouse’s notes for them, which on first publication were censored for political reasons. The literary ...”

“... unwilling subject. The tone of the letters and memoirs she left do not suggest complicity with an unknown reader, and when, in phases of her life which leave nothing to be recorded except externals, the biography becomes overloaded with trivia, one wonders if she is an appropriate subject for biography at all. When one has read the book, one begins to suspect ...”

“... are probably comparatively rare, over 90 per cent of the galaxy being ‘dark’ material with unknown components. Rees is a leading advocate of the idea that slow-moving ‘cold dark matter’ encouraged galaxies to form. Even though this theory is now winning, he is quick to say that the ‘hot dark matter’ of his competitors could help. As he ...”

“... but the stories were to go on, the responsibility for reading and writing them carried now by unknown friends, new incarnations of Eurydice and Pip and Janey and the Black Tarantula and all the others. ‘So the doves cooed softly to each other, whispering of their own events, over Janey’s grave in the grey Saba Pacha cemetery in Luxor. Soon many other ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of awe and wonder. His authors began with a generous wish ‘to learn about and possibly love the unknown, the Other’; the consequence, more passionate than they had hoped, was a literature ‘splendid in the moment of its enforced engagement with the almost unthinkable Other’ – and ‘capable of fineness even in its moment of withdrawal’. The love ...”

“... party, before he [was] heard or even summoned; and the information as well as the informers [were] unknown’. Second, Lord Camden drew attention to the vagueness of the procedures accompanying the execution of the power, with the search taking place ‘in the presence or the absence of the party, as the messengers shall think fit, and without a witness to ...”

“... of amends. The party continued in his hotel room, where we were joined by some girls, provenance unknown – he had a knack of surrounding himself with young women, not whores, but willing on terms to go to bed even with this hideous old man (for so he appeared to me). I went off to my room and was just going to bed when he burst in, collarless, fly ...”