“... Christopher, is one of the most celebrated of America’s younger poets but – I suspect – an unknown figure in England, at least as a poet (his novel, The Soloist, was published by Pan last year). In each case, this disparity in reputation – this failure, or at least delay, in the gaining of a transatlantic reputation – would seem, on the face of ...”

“... imagination as the garden, and the imagination has already been everywhere, has already shaped the unknown into the form of knowledge we call the ‘unknown’. The difficulty with this argument, as a nail to hang a series on, is not that it’s controversial but that it’s impossible to controvert, so it was just as ...”

“... an audience has increasingly depended on a poet’s willingness to do so, has kept him relatively unknown. This neglect is the more understandable given Fisher’s publication history. Many of his early pieces were circulated in fugitive pamphlets. Like the Collected Poems of 1968, the superbly crafted Matrix (1971) was published by Fulcrum Press – a ...”

“... solely because the game was developed in England’. Obviously affronted by the suggestion, an unknown antebellum songwriter, who apparently played baseball either for the Excelsiors or for the New York Knickerbockers, penned a 17-verse song popular in bars and at the elaborate post-game dinners hosted by the home club. The first and last verses of ...”

“... administrés. The encounter, if fortuitous, was far from accidental, however. A biography of an unknown man, who left no deliberate record and never did anything that mattered, is a bold and original undertaking. Corbin has made bold originality his speciality. Most historians would be happy to write a single truly pioneering book; he manages one every few ...”

“... cityscape outside his window): by the time she wrote ‘Requiem’ and he wrote ‘Lines on an Unknown Soldier’, both formally innovative and both concerned with recording the voices of the lost, they had been forced into a Modernism commensurate with their experiences, into responding to what they couldn’t avoid. Gumilev, unlike his more famous ...”

“... massive and challenging achievement behind him and the devotion of an active British publisher, is unknown not only to general readers but to those who think they know about modern poetry. To be strictly accurate, Peck is not a card-carrying Poundian – such poets tend to be tiresome – but there are several points of convergence. He resembles Pound in the ...”

“... extensively reported in the press. Around a dozen of them became major news stories and it was not unknown for the Times to devote an entire issue to a case. Though the commission potentially offered a means to reassert control over family property, it also involved washing dirty linen in public, with the attendant risk that the alleged lunatic might find ...”

“... he was not much involved) is Don Carlos, which is now routinely heard with whole swathes of music unknown to most of the 20th century. Elsewhere, Verdi’s desire to control the details of his musical text means that there are fewer surprises, but even a work as well known as Rigoletto can boast fresh configurations in its new, critical edition. For a century ...”

“... resumes, and your mind is again in your hard grip on the chains which had been until then as if unknown to your body during what might have been the interglacial lull, or the period during which the original ooze grew single-cell organisms, which grew small claws and feet and then had to have eyes, till your hands become again hard, heavy, and all the ...”

“... An unknown number of years ago a rockfall closed the entrance to a cave in the limestone gorge of the Ardèche river in France. In 1994 three speleologists found air wafting from an opening, cleared a way in and discovered caves and grottos running 400 metres or so into the rock. The walls are lined with drawings of animal species – bison, lions, bears, horses, aurochs, deer and rhinoceroses ...”

“... who underwrote John Hawkins’s second slaving-voyage along the coasts of Africa in 1564 is by an unknown artist ...”

“... wrong word order). It was, the exhibition catalogue suggests, ‘written at speed to meet some unknown deadline’.* The script, on the other hand, is masterly: fluent, rhythmical and regular. The swift, even script of the History has a modern urgency. It is exhibited beside a Pontifical – a book listing the ceremonies only a bishop can perform – that ...”

“... Steller discovered Rhytina stelleri (now also called Hydromalis gigas), a huge sea-going mammal unknown to the learned world and indeed to mankind in general. Georg Wilhelm Steller was one of those many Germans who came to Russia from the time of Peter the Great onwards to help modernise the empire and explore its resources. He had studied theology, botany ...”

“... pick up the latest information on the natural sciences before undertaking his exploration of the unknown territory, and although the expedition was to be equipped with recently-invented equipment, including a new kind of airgun and packets of friction matches, developed expressly for this occasion, Lewis’s education in landscape description was to be less ...”