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“... say, or Mum out shopping, I imagine less speed and more caution at the edges, due to the unknown in the halo of things. The huge effort of invention, or recollection, or both, with which a collective life is animated is Richler’s triumph in these books. With the close focus of a child she has gathered up the details and digressions which add up to ...”

“... name. Amélie Lang was on her birth certificate – her mother was Clara Lang, her father’s name unknown. For a time she called herself Fernande Belvallé. It was not clear when she became Fernande Olivier – perhaps when she left her husband, Paul-Emile Percheron, in 1900. She had met him the previous year when she was 17. She disliked his swarthy looks ...”

“... 1961 by Jean-Pierre Richard, under the title Pour un Tombeau d’Anatole, they revealed a largely unknown side of Mallarmé, one which even now disturbs the idea of him as the poet of pristine impersonality and detachment. My translation here is based on Bertrand Marchal’s 1998 Pléiade edition of Mallarmé’s Oeuvres complètes. These notes provide a ...”

“... indeed, ‘Look at me.’ And I do not go back on this. For once a thing is known it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten. And writing is the enemy of forgetfulness, of thoughtlessness. For the writer there is no oblivion. Only endless memory. What Brookner’s projected novelist has to say here sounds a different kind of contemporary note. The ...”

“... has such standing. Ministers have no power bases within the party or the country and are largely unknown to the electorate. They owe their places in the cabinet almost entirely to their relationship with Blair. As far as can be seen by an outsider, the cabinet is largely marginalised. It has no collective spirit, is rarely consulted by the prime ...”

“... is a lie twice over. First, for all its failings, Hamas brought to Gaza a level of law and order unknown in recent years, and did so without the large sums of money that donors showered on the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority. It eliminated the violent gangs and warlords who terrorised Gaza under Fatah’s rule. Non-observant Muslims, Christians and other ...”

“... years the dunes collapsed, the vegetation vanished. Now Orkney is a windy place, storms are not unknown, but the interim archaeological report on the site called this sustained erosion ‘exceptional and unprecedented’. It’s happening everywhere. With the sand and vegetation scoured away, a surface was exposed which was recognised as an extensive ...”

“... we found an expression for the inexpressible and finally skirted the difficulty of the unknown by wrapping it up in a single phrase so that we wouldn’t have to give it our full attention’. ‘Je ne sais quoi’ is not a translation of ‘I know not what’: it’s a shifting of responsibility. If we really knew what we don’t know, we’d say ...”

“... by colourful borders of rinceaux, acanthus leaves, peacocks, dragons and the crest of the (unknown) patron. This Bible is one of several Hebrew texts illuminated by artists who were probably Christian, the most famous being the Golden Haggadah in the British Library. Also in this section is Juan Vespucci’s World Map of 1526, an ornate copy of the ...”

“... absurdity of Lee’s plotting, which details the amorous misfortunes of Mary’s hitherto unknown twin daughters Ellinor and Matilda, who are suggestively raised in a secret cavern directly beneath Elizabeth’s court from which they periodically emerge to become fatally involved with a series of the jealous Queen’s favourites. At the same time she ...”

“... woman for whom I have any passionate feeling’. It is, as he admits, ‘the attraction of the unknown’, and it makes him come alive in the present. But ‘marriage would be unthinkable: one does not go to Sydenham for wives.’ At the beginning of the narrative he has married Jane, a lady better suited to the style of the house than the personality of ...”

“... most wonderful. Here he was, in beauty softly embedded, feeling with all his senses a previously unknown territory which he was to explore and conquer later.’ At the bottom of the page, in minute letters, as though intended to remain invisible, Andrew has set down Jocasta’s lines from King Oedipus: ‘Fear not thy mother’s marriage bed/For many a man ...”

“... at the bottom of a valley, sharply separated from its lighter surroundings and maintained by some unknown physical process. This lake at the bottom of the sea forcefully evoked the idea of an inner nature of things, normally hidden by an opaque veil and only occasionally discernible by the senses. It has remained with me as a moment of ultra-clear vision, an ...”

“... than itself which contains it and makes it possible, and its consequent orientation toward an unknown future. For Blumenberg, the Romantic attempt to discredit the Enlightenment, and the continuation of this attempt by Nietzsche and Heidegger, confuse a justified criticism of the Enlightenment’s attempt at ‘self-foundation’ with an unjustified ...”

“... transformation begun in October 1917 in Petrograd, and the American leap into the technological unknown, embodied in the Ford factories of Detroit as much as the skyscrapers of New York and Chicago. The protagonists were interlinked rival groups of designers and thinkers who interpreted these ‘new worlds’ in varying ways. Building a New World is the ...”