The Destruction of the Public Sphere

Ross McKibbin: Brown v. Cameron, 5 January 2006

... intends to go. Furthermore, both Cameron and Brown are in some senses, but for different reasons, unknown quantities. Cameron simply because he is unknown; Brown because he’s known only as a bruiser who tenaciously defends his own patch, not as a man who has to lead a government and a political party. Any prediction as to ...

Jews’ Harps

Gabriel Josipovici, 4 February 1982

Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse 
by T. Carmi.
Penguin, 608 pp., £6.95, September 1981, 0 14 042197 1
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... is good. And that makes about four hundred and fifty pages of good poetry, most of it completely unknown to English readers. What is even more startling is that this is the first comprehensive selection of Hebrew poetry not just in English but in Hebrew. To understand why this should be so is to gain an insight into the extraordinary way in which the ...

What Columbus Didn’t Know

Peter Green: The history of cartography, 21 February 2002

The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek, the Man who Discovered Britain 
by Barry Cunliffe.
Allen Lane, 182 pp., £12.99, October 2001, 0 7139 9509 2
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Ptolemy’s Geography: An Annotated Translation of the Theoretical Chapters 
edited by J. Lennart Berggren and Alexander Jones.
Princeton, 232 pp., £17.95, January 2002, 0 691 09259 1
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Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World: Atlas and Map-By-Map Directory 
by Richard J.A. Talbert.
Princeton, three volumes, £300, September 2000, 9780691031699
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... cave-systems. Hence weather-gods, divine anger and guidance, heaven above and hell below. The unknown is by definition strange and dangerous, and to begin with far exceeds our area of knowledge. As knowledge increases, the unknown – slowly, and most often grudgingly – diminishes. In the European model, we gradually ...

Two Poems

John Ashbery, 8 July 2010

... on Sundays, they walk a little ways into the oval spell others are soft on. She, a maid, unknown to terror, rising out of the ridge, its spreading cedars bemused and endearing. The ancestors have never been influenced by any kind of logic, not even a shrike’s, and now I can’t even say what a hornet’s-eye view of this catastrophe might ...

At the Ashmolean

Rosemary Hill: The Capture of the Westmorland, 19 July 2012

... an implicit commentary on the nature and scope of art-historical inquiry. ‘Portrait of an Unknown Man’ (1777) Much of Captain Machell’s cargo consisted of the luggage of travellers who were either still on the Grand Tour or had recently returned home. They had for the most part followed a well-worn route that led through France into ...

The Zero Pilot

Clive James, 5 February 2004

... paper where the engine raged That once propelled him through the startled sky At a rate of roll unknown to Kittyhawks. Paint, cables, webbing, instruments and guns: Much else is also missing, But the real absence is his, And always was. Hajime is short for ‘Our acquaintanceship begins: Until now, we did not know each other. From this day forth, we ...

Who Knows?

Meehan Crist: The Voynich Manuscript, 27 July 2017

The Voynich Manuscript 
edited by Raymond Clemens.
Yale, 336 pp., £35, November 2016, 978 0 300 21723 0
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... one knows its author or origins, and no one can read it. The faded brown script is written in an unknown alphabet that has baffled historians, cryptographers and bibliophiles for nearly six centuries. When Umberto Eco visited Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which has housed the manuscript since the 1960s, it was the only text he asked to ...

Two Poems

Glyn Maxwell, 17 July 1997

... he still hung back, Striking and striking as men muscled through Obscuring him, till he became unknown. In the Rain Forest Everything is alive. Everything is giant. The light and dark are giant, even the rain is listing the giants. There are three of us, Jack-size, with our caboclo guide, João, who’s showing us through the rain to things it is so ...

Unknowables

Caroline Campbell: Antonello da Messina, 7 October 2021

Antonello da Messina 
edited by Caterina Cardona and Giovanni Carlo Federico Federico Villa.
Palazzo Reale/Skira, 299 pp., £35, April 2019, 978 88 572 3898 2
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... carried the painting in his pocket.The outstanding work of this period is a small portrait of an unknown man, now at the Museo Mandralisca in Cefalù, which was included in both the Milan and New York exhibitions. The man appears to be smiling, but there is something ironic, even mocking, in his expression. The scratch across the mouth and eyes may be the ...

Supereffable

Tom Johnson: Mysteries of the Pearl Manuscript, 25 September 2025

Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript: Speculation, Shapes, Delight 
by Arthur Bahr.
Chicago, 257 pp., £36, March, 978 0 226 83535 8
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... last of these poems are among the greatest poetic works written in Middle English. The author is unknown, the patron is unknown, the original owners of the manuscript are unknown. All we do know is that Cotton acquired the volume from another antiquary, Henry Savile, in the late 16th ...

At Maison Empereur

Inigo Thomas, 10 May 2018

... who worked cargo ships out of Marseille, said that to walk the Canebière was a walk into the unknown. Can O’Beer – of course – was how British sailors made the unknown all too familiar. Then I asked about the hardware shops. I had been to Marseille a few times to see its new and old museums, but the Maison ...

The Wall

Eliot Weinberger, 5 July 2012

... and three were given a material bonus of a wristwatch. 2 February 1969: 48 shots were fired at an unknown border violator at the Massante Bridge who was carrying a 3.5-metre wooden plank, which he leaned against the wall and scurried up. His fate is unknown. 10 November 1965: 17 shots were fired at border violator Heinz ...

The Right to Protest

Rosa Curling, 9 May 2019

... of land across the north-west of England, was granted a pre-emptive injunction against ‘persons unknown’ in July 2017, preventing interference in the activities of its staff and contractors, before the company had even received permission to start drilling. This was soon followed by further injunctions granted to UK Oil and Gas (UKOG), Cuadrilla, iGAS and ...

Best Beloved

Kevin Brownlow, 18 April 1985

Chaplin: His Life and Art 
by David Robinson.
Collins, 792 pp., £15, March 1985, 9780002163873
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... at Vevey, Switzerland, to examine the stills and documents for our Thames Television programme Unknown Chaplin, we agreed that if there was one man in the world we did not envy it was David Robinson. He may have chosen a fascinating subject, but to marshal the facts, to make sense of them and to produce a readable and entertaining book was like climbing ...

Liza Jarrett’s Hard Life

Paul Driver, 4 December 1986

The Death of the Body 
by C.K. Stead.
Collins, 192 pp., £9.95, August 1986, 0 00 223067 4
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Kramer’s Goats 
by Rudolf Nassauer.
Peter Owen, 188 pp., £10.50, August 1986, 0 7206 0659 4
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Mefisto 
by John Banville.
Secker, 234 pp., £9.95, September 1986, 9780436032660
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The Century’s Daughter 
by Pat Barker.
Virago, 284 pp., £9.95, September 1986, 9780860686064
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Love Unknown 
by A.N. Wilson.
Hamish Hamilton, 202 pp., £9.95, August 1986, 0 241 11922 7
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... it bitterly’). It is typical of A.N. Wilson’s insouciance that the death scene in his Love Unknown is the breeziest possible – the abrupt demise of a character merely inserted so that she can be killed off (though not before she can be mocked). These two novels are more conventionally devised than the others, much more of a straightforward ...