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“... as if hollowed out by exposure to those bracing talents. But in Britain his name is almost unknown. He was born in 1908 in Lincoln, Illinois, the small town which would become his version of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesberg, Ohio: – a closed set to whose characters and ambience the writer can endlessly return, and his novels and stories rarely stray ...”

“... all culture, the works of Marx and Freud, Aristotle and Beethoven. (These four, plus a mysterious unknown fifth who was probably originally Kant, are the ghosts with whom he exchanges thoughts on a production of Coriolanus in his long poem of that name.) Schwartz had absolute faith in the tenets of high Modernism, and, initially anyway, worshipped Eliot and ...”

“... and yet terrifying, for at birth anything could go wrong, and you are assailed by all kinds of unknown forces over which you have no control. This may account for the anxieties every swimmer experiences from time to time in deep water. A swallow-dive off the high board into the void is an image that brings together all the contradictions of birth. The ...”

“... internal evidence of the lettre missive (or bordereau as it came to be known) he deduced that the unknown writer was an artilleryman who had access to all four bureaux of the War Ministry. Such a person could well be a stagiaire, or an officer who was training for a General Staff appointment. Amongst the list of artillery officers who were stagiaires appeared ...”

“... defendants were obvious. Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels were dead. Bormann, whose fate was then unknown, could be (and was) presumed a fugitive and tried in absentia. But 16 of Hitler’s former ministers and governors of occupied countries were in Allied ...”

“... his dictionary: ‘curmudgeon. n.s.(it is a vitious manner of pronouncing coeur mechant, Fr. An unknown correspondent.) An avaricious churlish fellow; a miser; a niggard; a churl; a griper.’ In 1775, when John Ash came to compile his dictionary he simply took over Johnson’s etymology, without thinking too much, and produced the following (shortening ...”

“... too ponderous truths. And knowing the precise mid-point would, of course, give me the Thing Most Unknown: the day I would die. Knowing the middle, the end could be known. It was algebra: xs and equal signs, as plus bs. If the past is a province the aged revisit and the future is one that the child dreams, birth and death are the oceans that bound them. And ...”

“... liquid is not petrol but, unpleasantly, ‘thinner’, and the author of this terrific and almost unknown masterpiece is Tadeusz Konwicki. In all, six books by Konwicki (born in Wilno in 1926) have appeared in English. I propose to leave the first two out of discussion: The Anthropos-Spectre-Beast, ‘a fantasy for young readers’ that is as hard-edged and ...”

“... the Eora could see the First Fleeters, but the First Fleeters, peering into the immense unknown of the continent, could not see them. As the frontier extended, the line was carved deep into law, politics, culture and the national psyche. Rather than declare war, Britain justified her claim to sovereignty over Australia by the doctrine of terra ...”

“... Up until the late Fifties, Mikhail Bakhtin was completely unknown in his own country. Then a group of graduate students at the Gorky Institute of World Literature, who had come across the first version of his book on Dostoevsky (1929) and wondered about his fate, discovered to their astonishment that he was still alive and teaching at an obscure institute in the Russian provinces ...”

“... who or what is sacred. When on 11 November 1920 George processed bareheaded with the coffin of the Unknown Warrior to its interment in Westminster Abbey, he did so at the urging of the archbishop of Canterbury, who was unhappy that the king had agreed to inaugurate the ‘pagan’ Cenotaph on the same day. Ridley’s worldly sensibility plays down George’s ...”

“... or abandoned. In each case what beliefs were being rejected, and what came in their place, are unknown. All we can say is that there may have been as many as five different ages of prehistoric paganism, signalled by different kinds of archaeological remains. There are things, though, that persist. Folk superstition isn’t the same as organised ...”

“... the tropics, because the ash cloud reached both poles, but beyond that the location of the ‘1809 Unknown’ remains a mystery. For Tambora, however, there are eyewitness accounts. Stamford Raffles, then the lieutenant-governor of Java, wrote about the eruption in a footnote to his History of Java (1817): at the distance of three hundred miles, it seemed to ...”

“... Room of Liverpool Street Station. Standing transfixed for perhaps hours, in a room hitherto unknown to him (and about to be demolished, to enable an expansion of the Victorian station), he feels as if the space contains ‘all the hours of my past life, all the suppressed and extinguished fears and wishes I had ever entertained’. He suddenly sees, in ...”