“... 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 ...”

“... the ordinary; a newspaper advert offering for sale a hatbox of old letters generates a poem to the unknown lady who wrote them, and a Sears, Roebuck catalogue entry an ode to a dressmaker’s dummy. Something of the faux-naif hovers above his diction, as it does Bishop’s, especially in poems that work up a single conceit, such as ‘On the Death of Friends ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... his case and relieves the News of the World of £200,000. The fate of possible perjurors is still unknown, but it will be some time before the country is so riveted by a trial, one that has seemed, in the battle of its language if nothing else, to describe some important new contours of public and private life in Scotland. Sheridan took a stand against the ...”

“... to evening wear and bonnets were retrimmed for everyday. Elaborate veils and trains were unknown. As wedding dresses kept pace with broader fashion trends, the exhibition’s chronological arrangement shows waists rising and falling, hips and busts expanding and contracting. Once the dress became a separate genus, however, its relationship to fashion ...”

“... Antonia Vanderbrocht and Petronila Valdearenas. The distressed man on the far right is unknown – perhaps one of the court painters who, Goya reported, were incapable of the work he himself is seen doing here.These identifications are helpful. Few painters make you as curious as Goya does about the people he painted. To look at the picture is to ...”

“... curiosity. Quite ordinary pictures of known places give pleasure in a way better ones of unknown places do not. Ruskin Spear’s Sickert-like picture of deckchair, shingle and sea, which is a minor painting, is an excellent stimulant to memory. Among the Victorian paintings are a couple by Alma-Tadema which, as Sickert put it, show what a cultured ...”

“... political earthquake can justly be compared, the new group which inherited power was virtually unknown outside the country. Who, before 1978, had heard of the Ayatollah Khomeini – or even knew what an ayatollah was? But more remarkable than the personalities of the leaders was the fact that this revolution – the first since the 17th century – was ...”

“... for Mailer, and might have made one for Dostoevsky. But it is also a treacherous subject. Its unknown quantities – which include an under-examined Northern social background – afford all too much scope for invention. To reverse the expression used by ‘James Hogg’, they are all too impressive to the imagination. Talented writers have been drawn to ...”

“... Corinthians, it was once said, worshipped at the tomb of the unknown god. Liberals worship at the tomb of the unknown principle; they’d be prepared to die for their beliefs, if only they knew what they were. Nowadays the creed, at least among political philosophers, recalls the fate of the Old Left: implacable certitude combined with smithereened factionalism ...”

“... possession in the name of King George III; and if it didn’t, to plant the flag on whatever still unknown lands were encountered in the circumnavigation.The Royal Society would organise the astronomy, securing a grant from the king to pay for it; the navy would be responsible for the ship, commander, crew, stores and victualling. The vessel was the bark ...”

“... for his own people, but the transmission of it to Continental Europe, where English remained an unknown tongue. Latin could get you an international reputation there, as achieved for instance by Elizabeth Jane Weston, ‘The Maid of England’, whose poetry – on her emotions, her life, on poverty and on the floods in Prague – won her a European ...”

“... bulk of the population occurs in an individual who also suffers from a genetic disease, due to an unknown misprint that you are trying to detect. If the disease and the harmless misprint are inherited together, there is a likelihood that the latter occurs on the same chromosome as the misprint responsible for the disease. This can be a clue to guide the ...”

“... eight novels. Heath, a Guyanese writer, has now produced a remarkable body of work yet is still unknown in America. He is virtually unknown in Britain, where he has lived and written for the last twenty years – in spite of having won the Guardian’s fiction prize for his novel The Murderer, and in spite of years of ...”