“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the time, and it is Mitchell’s claim that the sum of the Auden/Britten collaborations (including unknown quantities like the Group Theatre scores) is larger than that of Brecht and Weill, and as important in shaping the image of the Thirties. Some instinct suggests that this is not the case, perhaps because of the abstruseness of the texts, the inventiveness ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... his grandparents were half-Jewish, half-Swedish and Kalmyk respectively. Extracts from previously unknown correspondence between Lenin and Inessa Armand strongly suggest that they had an intimate relationship. The complex sources of the Party’s pre-Revolutionary funds and the bitter disputes over their control are described at some length and there is new ...”

“... the tool of the Soviet Government in China, has gold and rifles. Hillsmen love both. Lawrence has unknown resources and a silver tongue. Lawrence was certainly in India at the time, serving as a clerk under the name of Shaw at a station near the Afghan border. The idea of Lawrence, the Imperial Hero, doing undercover work among the Afghani tribesmen had ...”

“... among the eighty thousand-odd forced labourers, and the neighbouring population, is still unknown. Medvedev adds that Kurchatov could draft detainees from a special prison to work inside the reactor. The context of the Cold War, in its various phases, is well developed. Holloway writes that Stalin ‘used the Cold War to enhance repression at ...”

“... His father died before he was born, his mother three years after. She was a French girl, name unknown, who worked in a café and once sat for Cézanne. His father’s exact identity is not revealed. This is Morgan’s mystery, and at one point he thinks he’s solved it and that Scurra is his father. He would rather like that. Disconcertingly, for the ...”

“... spies for what is known as the‘King’s Secret’, a separate system of foreign relations, quite unknown to the Foreign Ministry and pursuing different aims. With the coming of war, it became one of d’Eon’s duties, as agent for the King’s Secret, to act as a courier for a secret correspondence between the Empress Elizabeth of Russia and Louis XV. He ...”

“... claims the novelist’s privilege: ‘He left his children, and his children’s children, to walk unknown through the streets of London, part of the crowd, lost to history, but brushing shoulders perhaps with the descendants of the man to whom he gave his life.’ Fitzgerald’s life and ideas present a perfect example of Rousseau’s honest man in ...”