“... In the first story of the collection, ‘The Twenty-Seventh Man’, Pinchas Pelovits is an unknown writer in Stalinist Russia who has been arrested as a ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ and is imprisoned for anti-Soviet activity along with ‘an eminent selection of Europe’s surviving Yiddish literary community’. Only in fiction can he imagine a ...”

“... referred to her friends by their first names, as if people so well known to her could hardly be unknown to anyone she happened to be talking to’). Although the scene of the tango in the snow is striking and the characters, especially Mr Picker, are intriguing, the prose is so seemingly directionless, ample for a few paragraphs then abrupt and excessively ...”

“... on with a tar brush. In a celebrated instance she flatly declared that ‘warfare is practically unknown among the Arapesh’ and went on to romanticise at length about the educational correlates of their lack of aggression. Derek Freeman was not the first professional anthropologist to find such slapdash generalisation academically intolerable. One of Reo ...”

“... The mazy development through the Georgian age of state responsibility for social ills remains unknown territory. Coram’s world coped with its social sores because they remained small enough. The festers of darkest Britain became epidemic in the 19th century: paupers and unemployed, starving Irishmen, displaced Highlanders, the homeless and the ...”

“... is no longer so. In fact, rumour has it that things are altogether stickier now and that it is not unknown for a dealer to turn down some quite nicely priced volumes on the grounds that they are ‘boring’. In the days when I used to go down there, though, he would take almost anything. And on Fridays the Lane would be alive with reviewers struggling in from ...”

“... even at the beginning of all things. And when she looked in the opposite direction, towards the unknown future, death, the endless extent beyond death, she was still there.’ The idea of continuity is carried further in the last chapter, which looks like an alternative ending with Lisa after all safe in Israel, but turns out to be set in an after-life ...”

“... it is perhaps the most important discovery of its kind this century – comparable, say, to an unknown masque by Milton turning up at the Bibliothèque Nationale. It shows two putti half-way up a tree teasing a faun – one of them apparently blowing a raspberry – while between the impossibly wide-stretched legs of the faun a third acrobatic infant plays ...”

“... the present without feeling this need – that compulsion expressed in Wordsworth or Proust – is unknown in Narayan’s characters. What he most conveys is equanimity. This has conventional Indian forms, and they occur in Narayan, but mainly it’s a marked personal feature of the man himself. His novels range well beyond the bounds of normal experience, but ...”

“... William James (49), Nietzsche (46) and Anaïs Nin (40). These are only the familiar names; the unknown table-talkers, maxim-mongers and cracker-barrel wiseacres buttonhole the reader hardly less repetitively. Among the prolific pronouncements on human nature and the social order there are, to be sure, many pithy, thought-provoking and ...”

“... have served to protect the painted reliefs with which so many of the blocks had been decorated. Unknown quantities of these blocks still support or are enclosed in many of the Theban monuments: to date, more than forty-five thousand of them have been removed by engineers engaged in stabilising and rebuilding the shattered temples. At Karnak and Luxor ...”

“... my comment. Instead we are told of ‘an amusing criticism’ in which several years ago an unknown British reader sent me a letter disputing the validity of my interpretation of the names given to human beings, dogs, cattle and racehorses ... My critic does not realise that, in our disciplines, facts can never be viewed in isolation but must be seen in ...”

“... so easy to understand. When he wrote about the entries to the competition for a monument to ‘The Unknown Political Prisoner’, readers’ letters filled pages. While other critics valued art as free expression, Berger suggested that freedom might be destructive. While others wrote about what it was like to look at a painting, he wrote about what it was like ...”

“... the documentary detail in which the Beckinsales revel, as well as the rhymsters – known and unknown – whose verse they disinter. The statistically agile will be tempted to turn to their pocket calculators, if only to estimate how many acres of mature woodland might be needed to construct even a small hamlet, given that three hundred trees were ...”

“... occasion upon which Belloc produced it. This is entirely harmless. But anecdotes of a similarly unknown provenance and of a more damaging sort continue to float around. There are several about Belloc’s behaviour at church services. From Mr Wilson we learn that when Belloc’s son-in-law, Reginald Jebb, was being received into the Catholic ...”

“... naturally wish to present the big pieces and certainly cannot afford to risk too many failures by unknown composers. But it must be remembered that not even Puccini had a real success the first time round. All that we can hope, if we share Mr White’s optimism in his delightfully illustrated book, is that, having discovered that the English ‘flock with ...”