“... 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 ...”

“... Times declined to mention the CIA’s central role in Mossadegh’s overthrow – it was the then unknown agency’s first major operation of the Cold War. Welcoming the shah on his visit to the United States in 1954, the Times exulted: ‘Today Mossadegh is where he belongs – in jail. Oil is flowing again into the free markets of the world.’ Iran, it ...”

“... breathless dispatches from history’s front line, to be endlessly recycled thereafter for reasons unknown. Instead, Runciman puts down the texts’ durability to grammatical modality. They swap the indicative or imperative mood for what he calls, at the end of the book, ‘optative’ sociology. This neither describes nor directly enjoins, but imagines how ...”

“... the plates record. The ‘elixir’, Benjamin writes, ‘that might act as a developing agent is unknown’. And while Baudelaire doesn’t possess this vital developing fluid, he is somehow, ‘thanks to infinite mental efforts’, able to read the plates. ‘He alone is able to extract from the negatives of essence a presentiment of its real picture. And ...”

“... turns out that they’re all attracted by a mysterious document entrusted to Barthes by persons unknown, a document that had vanished by the time he reached the hospital. This short text had to do with a ‘seventh function of language’, a phrase that Simon is able to unpack with reference to the functions ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... her concerns. Once the novel has reached its climax, the marriage that ensues remains unseen and unknown. Emma (1815) is unusual even in describing, in its final paragraph, the heroine’s wedding. But the fact that Austen herself had a keen sense of what her characters did next was revealed by her nephew and early biographer, James Edward Austen-Leigh. He ...”

“... some twelve thousand species; today there are at least 1.8 million named species, and many more unknown. But what is a species? Since Darwin, biologists have caricatured Linnaeus as the arch-defender of the fixity of species. It is true that in his earlier works Linnaeus stated that God had created a fixed number of species; seeming novelties, such as 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to this biography. He attends carefully to the writing, and he has discovered much previously unknown material, here expounded with exemplary care. His portrait of Ford includes sketches of all those writers with whom he came into mostly beneficent contact (they certainly make an impressive list, especially the ones he could refer to as les jeunes), and ...”

“... of the Normans – notoriously has no presence even in the educated popular mind. Its history is unknown except to specialists, not part of the school curriculum, regarded as part of the Dark Ages. Since everything began in 1066, the Hammer of the Scots can occupy all history books as ‘Edward the First’, his namesakes the Confessor and the Elder ...”