“... The third also has relations with both. The book was Phoenician Story, the author, Lollianus (unknown – unless, indeed, he was P. Hordeonius Lollianus, Professor of Rhetoric in the University of Athens, whose pupils set up his statue in the marketplace, to honour his services to orthodox flatulence). Two pages, this time, with a sensational scene. The ...”

“... or terms in what one might call the primal scene of Lacanism, in which a Subject desirous of some unknown Object intervenes in the Battery of Signifiers and undergoes a Splitting. Each of these terms has its ‘dominant’ discourse: the discourse of the Master belonging to the unsplit Subject, the discourse of the Hysteric to the split Subject, the discourse ...”

“... I have already met the next person I will sleep with, or whether it will be someone currently unknown to me; I wonder what she looks like, and whether we’ll do it here, or at her place, and what that place will be like; I decide to have a Chess Records logo painted on the living-room wall. (There was a shop in Camden that had them all ...”

“... to prove his credentials as a universal or Catholic Christian, and so rehearses an otherwise unknown version of a creed to sum up his faith. This creed may represent a pre-existing fragment of British Church liturgy, but in any case it is intended to prove Patrick’s theological affinity with the two universal Christian creeds in circulation by the end ...”

“... streets of Paris in 1968, ‘discourse’ or the floating signifier could keep it warm. It is not unknown for followers of Michel Foucault to celebrate the anarchic force of madness while voting Liberal Democrat. You can back Tony Blair and Pierre Bourdieu with equal enthusiasm. In the era of Bolshevism, by contrast, theory had at times to hobble hard to keep ...”

“... on Sleeman, ‘enters a mysterious world of superstition, ritual and death’ and ‘uncovers an unknown side of his personality, a mystic affinity with the blood brotherhood’ of the thugs. While Merchant’s sometime collaborators (Ruth Prawer Jhabvala as well as James Ivory) seem to have winced when faced with the chief plot premise – that an ...”

“... sacred and the secular’.* Though vandalism by drunken revellers, then as now, was by no means unknown, the incident was at once recognised as something different. It was too widespread, too well organised, too deliberately selective, to be explained by random or casual rowdiness, and Athens’s citizens for the most part took it very seriously. There were ...”

“... than as Orwell suggests, passion). Many infants and children died from intestinal infections, an unknown number of which were actually deliberate arsenic poisoning. In 1849, Rebecca Smith was executed for killing eight of her babies after birth, having claimed in her defence that her husband was an alcoholic and that she feared her children ‘might come to ...”

“... natural world were ‘more poets than observers’. Finally, however, he was pushed too far. Two unknown naturalists (so unknown that generations of historians have been unable to determine the first name of one of them) conjectured a link between molluscs and vertebrates. If, they argued, a vertebrate is bent backwards ...”

“... warming, the change would to all intents and purposes be irreversible. We know that up to some unknown set of limits, knowledge, skills, institutions and manufactured capital can substitute for nature’s resources; meaning that even if an economy decumulated some of its natural capital, in quantity or quality, its wealth would increase if it invested ...”

“... himself, but did learn about ‘rhythm and subtle relations and many other things previously unknown to me’. That admission must have cost him dear: he was strikingly ungrateful to those who taught him. Barely three months had passed before he described the office as ‘hateful’. These two stints were the nearest he ever had to a formal architectural ...”

“... scarce. Mantegna was the child of a carpenter, from a very ordinary village. His birthdate is also unknown.) When Bellini turned back to The Presentation of Christ in the Temple twenty years later he was the master of a new style, and dialogue with Mantegna had established itself as an aspect of that mastery – his great Agony in the Garden, done in response ...”

“... these masks is art itself, which is unavailable to reason and not fully involved with history, an unknown external to man even if produced by man.Should we fall in with the wild Romanticism of that peroration? Should we fall in with the historicist judgment that canvases from a century ago constitute painting’s ‘high point’? Should one author attempt ...”

“... identity or sphere (either the nightclub or the library) that might foreclose some as yet unknown experience. The ad’s prose is also typical of Dustan: blasts of detail; a trashiness underpinned by the desire to describe the world exactly as he lives it; a craving for sex conjured by the trailing ellipses. ‘Autopornobiography’ was the way he ...”

“... McEwan has much more assurance and resource, and so has Raymond Carver, a writer virtually unknown in this country who superficially resembles Carey but is – up to now, at any rate – working at quite a different level. All the same, Exotic Pleasures is an accomplished book. So, for that matter, is Bliss, for Carey has narrative energy, and writes ...”