“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... I knew to be the 21-year-old Shmiel while the identity of the other one was impossible to guess, unknown and unknowable . . . Unknown and unknowable: this could be frustrating, but also produced a certain allure. The photographs of Shmiel and his family were, after all, more fascinating than the other family pictures ...”

“... might be misdirection of the sort that enables something secret to enter the room. Could this unknown white session musician in fancy dress actually be an authentic Louisiana hoodoo man, a root doctor, a gris-gris man? Is the whole thing so fake it’s real? The answers Toop comes up with are fittingly strange. Gris-Gris turns out to be a rich mix of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Soviet Union began to falter. After the end of the Cold War, Ukraine gave the Tatars a previously unknown freedom. It is that freedom that is now at ...”

“... he may loken over a gret high hous.’ (As Mandeville is himself a fictional appellation for an unknown man, some laxity in measurements is to be expected.) But though so tall, they are hospitable to the small. They have been known to host tiny yellow-billed oxpeckers on their bodies: the small birds remove ticks from their skin, and clean the food from ...”

“... view to proving that they were arranged by Catullus himself, and not, as is often claimed, by some unknown posthumous editor. They are set out in three groups, according to length and metre. The first 60 poems, which are fairly short, are written in a variety of metres and generally described as the polymetrics. In the centre of the book is a series of long ...”

“... became – I found what can only be called ‘a slim volume’, with limp covers, in an unknown script and language. I don’t remember Aunt Ann translating one line from its pages, nor ever explaining how she came to own it. But she told me some facts about the woman who wrote it – the first time I heard those words: Anna Akhmatova ...”

“... trained in Flanders, the artistic centre of the Burgundian Netherlands. Van Eyck’s work was not unknown to Valencian painters, but no other Spanish artist of this period achieved anything like Bermejo’s mastery of Netherlandish technique, and nothing is known about the only two Flemings living in Valencia who could perhaps have trained him. The Prado ...”

“... Helen Demuth had a son, Freddy, who became a close friend of Eleanor’s. Freddy’s father was unknown. When Engels was dying, Eleanor asked him: ‘Who is Freddy’s father?’ Engels, who had already lost the power of speech, took a pencil and wrote: ‘KM is FD’s father.’ Eleanor was distressed beyond measure. However, when Freddy died he was buried ...”

“... of booze, snobbery, sodomy and that hopelessly abstract tenderness for the lower classes, unknown except as subordinates and bed fellows. Some scenes, some dialogue, remind one of the early Angus Wilson. Others recall Anthony Powell’s Poussin-dominated series of novels and also, at moments, that writer’s earlier work. Yet Banville’s own style is ...”

“... cast in plaster so that the imprints of their soles can be compared with those of the 15-year-old unknown who may be the narrator’s brother. The macabre element is reinforced by a chance encounter with a hearse-driver in the carpark outside the university canteen, which, the driver tells them, is famous for its ‘cordon bleu’ cooking. This loquacious ...”

“... that ‘I take it for granted that their thinking’ – he is referring also to Thoreau – ‘is unknown to the culture whose thinking they worked to found (I mean culturally unpossessed, unassumable among those who care for books, however possessed by shifting bands of individuals), in a way it would not be thinkable for Kant and Schiller to be ...”

“... the Macedonian proposition that refugees be driven to Skopje airport and shoved on aeroplanes to unknown destinations, airport officials donned their masks before the refugees were even off the buses. When they came through the metal detectors and the young men were frisked, the officials added surgical gloves to their repertoire of insults. As one busload ...”