“... the model to which GUM, the grim all-purpose store in Moscow, is an approximation. Servants are as unknown as money. You wash clothes at public laundries. You eat at public restaurants. In 19th-century America (and, come to that, today), the height of luxury was to have an awning from the front door to the kerb. In Dr Leete’s Boston, such awnings spring out ...”

“... loved one left behind who fills her letters with metaphysical questions, a hero’s travels among unknown and violent men, and lots of what used to be called local colour. Laing’s effects arise, in fact, from the steady accumulation of detail. The pace is deceptively slow. Imperceptibly, a hypnotic power takes hold. This is the 19th century as seen through ...”

“... from the men’s handkerchief counter in a department store, the governess, who represents the unknown future. With her ‘pale broad, patient, dreaming Russian face’, she brings order and calm back to the house: the children love her, and, inevitably, Frank finds himself desperately attracted to her. But she’s something else as well. The bitchy ...”

“... his is being safely kept in King’s College Library awaiting some mid-21st-century biographer of unknown sympathy (‘It was in 1970 that the young Motion’s shameless careerism first became apparent. On this occasion, however, his blandishments went unanswered, and many blamed him for the death of E.M. Forster’). When I first read of the octogenarian ...”

“... to the contrary, he had rare access to all levels of society, and had choices that were unknown to most Australians. Whether in the bush or at Cambridge, White had time and means to ‘find himself’, mixing with the bright and powerful, belonging to a class which gave him some measure of sexual society that he would have been unlikely to find as ...”

“... so expensive that only the Tories can do it effectively. What the poll tax achieved was to drive unknown numbers of potential Labour voters off the register. The quangos are just the latest piece of evidence to add to all the rest. (Who now remembers Sir Derek Rayner’s crusade against quangos in Thatcher’s early years?) The other great driving force ...”

“... are caveats, of course. Where the culture of the skilled working class had once been is an anomic, unknown Scotland whose grim council-house settlements (Wilsontown, Legbrannock, Newarthill), bereft of their founding mines or factories, sprawl across the central belt from Dalmellington to Tranent. The drug-slugged no-go areas of Irvine Welsh’s Edinburgh make ...”

“... snap of him partying with his wife, Lisa, a former bank worker, when their whereabouts were still unknown. But a wretched fax purporting to have been sent from a hotel in Kuala Lumpur at about this time didn’t strike me as the handiwork of some kind of equities top gun. There was a forlorn, beaten aspect about the 28-year-old author’s assertion that he ...”

“... upwards and onwards to the dignity of a Nation. Victorians, Queenslanders, or Westralians will be unknown, and every child born of the soil, or approved and naturalised colonist, will in future be an Australian. An Australian; a citizen of a nation whose realm is a continent and whose destiny is – what? ...    Australia has ever been an exemplar to the ...”

“... the medical verisimilitude of the dénouement. The resemblance between Ella’s child and the unknown poet, he wrote in 1896, was ‘a physical possibility that may attach to women of imaginative temperament, and that is well supported by the experience of medical men and other observers of such manifestations’. Despite the implication that the artist ...”

“... He regrets that ‘ritual was not a tool people can use to investigate or reason about the unknown,’ but is very attracted to its discretion, its enigma. ‘The spaces of rituals created magic zones of mutual affirmation,’ he writes. It’s not so certain, however, that their character inheres in stone, in the type of temple or dwellings where they ...”

“... The alternative was to let the French return, and then wait to be granted their freedom at some ...”

“... another word, and Adams proceeded to lodge a suit for defamation of character against persons unknown. End of story-one familiar to anyone who ever suffered such treatment during the Cold War and its colonial-style equivalent. I can remember receiving treatment of this kind in the Fifties. It makes one tired, and then it makes one angry. It made Jaabe So ...”

“... St John in the Uffizi, and in at least twenty other paintings of the Cinquecento – ‘a gesture unknown to devotional art before or since’, and later deplored. Steinberg has a long and brilliant excursus on bowdlerism, the practice of eliminating or toning down such gestures for the sake of decency (and for other reasons no less reprehensible), citing ...”

“... which abolishes private property, and the society which has fulfilled these conditions lies in an unknown part of a newly-discovered world. Utopia is, in every sense, unapproachable and, for the present, inimitable. More might have approved David Hume’s epitaph on utopianism: ‘All plans of government, which suppose great reformation in the manners of ...”