“... have added another myth to those already wrapped round Orwell. In their previous book, The Unknown Orwell, and again in Orwell: The Transformation, they postulate two characters who inhabit in sequence the same body: first Eric Blair (Orwell’s real name), and then, by a process of enlightenment and political commitment, George Orwell. This separation ...”

“... which he tells us something about suicide, and something about death, and something about all the unknown and unknowable future experiences that death represents. And he does this by telling us something about conscience. Or rather, two things about conscience. The first quarto of Hamlet has, ‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,’ while the second ...”

“... to them. Any future production of the play was forbidden. The Octavia, a first-century drama of unknown authorship once attributed to Seneca the younger, comes closest to providing a Roman parallel to Phrynicus’ play – a tragedy on a contemporary theme – although the similarities are tenuous. Most obviously, only a few fragments of The Capture of ...”

“... sand when she dug on the beach. Too large to unearth, its surface partly visible, but its contours unknown. She taught herself to ignore it, to walk away. And yet the hole remained her hollow point of origin, the cold crosshairs of her existence. She returned to it now. At last the sand gave way, and she was able to pry out what was buried, to raise it ...”

“... I reread Li’s memoir and came across her description of Stefan Zweig’s novella Letter from an Unknown Woman (1922):The recipient of the letter, a famous writer and womaniser, does not recognise the sender, a woman who claims to have loved him all her life. She was his neighbour as a young girl and watched him live a busy life among women. Later, he ...”

“... sole contribution to the sum of human wisdom – his litany of known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns – lacks a fourth permutation: unknown knowns, things we know but don’t know we know, a more suggestive notion of ideology than Brooks’s systems of extremist ideas. For a slim volume, Seduced by Story ...”

“... messages in bottles tossed into the ‘flood of barbarism bursting on Europe’ for the benefit of unknown future readers. The floodwaters have now mercifully receded, and the bottles sporadically wash up on foreign shores, thanks to intrepid translators taking on the challenge of Adorno’s idiosyncratic prose. The first to make him accessible to an ...”

“... in Greece of the most powerful personal weapon of antiquity, which could nevertheless plausibly be unknown to stay-at-home suitors because it was so difficult to make, conserve and use that it kept being reintroduced by successive steppe migrants from very early times till the 13th century. Soldiers and Ghosts has a somewhat mawkish prologue about the warrior ...”

“... O’Brien and Benedict Kiely, among others, one could give long odds against a manuscript by an unknown Irish novelist or poet seeing the light of first publication in Boston or in New York.So it’s back to London and the old Anglo-Irish alliance. As we Irish were England’s first colony, now it seems likely that we will be her last literary ...”

“... stunning, counter-intuitive and of no immediate practical consequence. They are therefore widely unknown outside their fraternity. A further reason for their obscurity is that the hard facts they have skilfully revealed appear to run exactly in the opposite direction to the requirements of those who write books about the mind. They have studied the sequence ...”

“... in it nothing of the Victorian moralist. In the world of this art the atmosphere of the taboo is unknown; there is none of the excited hush, the skirting round, the thrill of shocked reprobation, or any of the forms of sentimentality typical of Victorian fiction when such themes are handled.’ We may find Leavis’s circumlocution itself rather coy (‘Mrs ...”

“... questioned how far Stalin was able, in practice, to exercise such autocratic powers. Fitzpatrick (unknown to McNeal) has depicted a Communist Party responding to changing social forces. The growing impatience of younger Communists – those who had grown up in the revolutionary period – with the slow pace of change during the late Twenties fuelled the ...”

“... above all to standing where no (white) man had ever stood before, finding organisms hitherto ‘unknown to science’ or hacking his way through trackless jungle. Such a burning ambition to achieve glory, especially by testing himself physically to the limit, is not obvious from Wilson’s portrait, which is of a thin, somewhat stooped figure, blind in one ...”

“... immigrants on the doorstep; in areas where there are few black or brown faces, it is fear of the unknown, fed by tales from the ghettos. That fear has turned the National Front from a fringe movement at the start of the Eighties into France’s fourth strongest political grouping. There is still an understandable but mistaken tendency among his opponents and ...”

“... her mystique on a London estate; the discomforting street justice administered by Clarkie on an unknown woman for an unknown crime; Uncle Oscar’s account of a fight in the factory canteen: Ah look down, an si mi breakfas dat ah pay mi big two pounds fah, scatta hall ova di table. Den ah ot burnin feelin ina mi groin ...”