“... enjoyment from reading these volumes. I never pick them up without finding some previously unknown passage or some striking conjunction of ideas. The most familiar figures are placed in new frames, Seamus Heaney’s introduction to Yeats sets up a dialogue between the two most widely read Irish poets. Heaney situates Yeats in relation to Moore, Mangan ...”

“... mean ‘a system composed of hundreds of thousands of equations, with hundreds of thousands of unknown quantities, the underlying assumption being always that the latest data are used.’ And Hayek had himself been too sanguine. It’s said that by the early Eighties, Soviet planners were having to cope with 10,000,000,000,000 bits of often false ...”

“... coincided with that of the hand axe, the classic stone-age implement, whose precise function is unknown. For more than a million years, Homo erectus and its descendants knocked out hand axes of near-identical form all over the world. Discarded hand axes may litter entire landscapes: a flawed half-made implement was not bodged imaginatively into something ...”

“... too much like accident. ‘And more curses,’ his son continues, ‘more curses perhaps, as yet unknown.’ The watchmaker, who believes clocks not only record time but cause it, invents a watch which will prolong his life. But he falls prey to something which is beyond his control, something bound to happen to someone who tries to play God. In Graham ...”

“... on the mound. The mother balled up the newspaper wrapping and bowled it onto the grave of some ...”

“... the capital. Twelve years on, the death toll is somewhere in the region of thirty thousand, with unknown numbers of disappeared and injured. Today, Sendero controls much of the countryside – including the strategically important central highlands – and has reached the slums of the capital. Sendero is the creation of Abimael Guzman, a former professor of ...”

“... that are extant, the miles of Congressional documents, the personal correspondence as yet unknown, radio broadcasts that have been preserved and diaries and journals as yet undiscovered. The use of carefully selected works of fiction, joined to biographies and journals and diaries, is a shorthand form of work otherwise neglected or reluctantly ...”

“... postpones the moment of the promised second volume of Sexual Personae; having started as an unknown underdog, Paglia must now live up to the vast expectations created by her own huge publicity machine. No wonder she is afraid to debate with her peers, nervous about her image, and given to cancelling her ...”

“... the one on the screen, Gary Oldman in extravagant armour, is the beleaguered West rather than the unknown East; he stand, so to speak, at our end of Jonathan Harker’s bridge. His very sacrilege doesn’t make sense in any other world, and we can scarcely disavow him. Bela Lugosi in Tod Browning’s version was human enough – there is an unforgettable ...”

“... executives and both doing the entirely unexpected things they chose to do, while remaining unknown even to one another, and quite out of the public eye. W.C. Williams was a hard-working New Jersey physician. They were all originals but all in the American grain, declining the European alternatives chosen by Eliot and Pound, and all engaged in ...”

“... forces into political life, forces whose interaction had to be carefully managed in the face of an unknown and unknowable future.Bismarck saw himself less as a pilot – as he was depicted in a famous 1890 cartoon – than as a chessplayer, dealing not with individual decision-makers but with the interplay of powerful forces and able to put aside ideology when ...”

“... The Great Mosque at Djenné The Songhay empire, now forgotten by many Africans and largely unknown to Europeans, left a linguistic mark in the Niger basin. A dozen languages and dialects, spoken by roughly three million people, derive from the hybrid imperial vernacular. I was brought up in Niger and speak a dialect of Songhay. In my school textbooks I ...”

“... of a shipwreck survivor carried on ocean currents to the South Pole, where he fetches up on an unknown island with a temperate climate and an ancient civilisation. Poe was inspired by the real-life adventurer John Symmes, who was fundraising at the time for an expedition to the North Pole, which he believed to be the entrance to a subterranean hollow ...”

“... her            because time is always so short, you must go by now without mention, as unknown to the future as to the past, with one man’s eyes resting on you in the interval of his concern. In the memoirs, there are few such intervals. Indeed, there is one somewhat chilling sequence when Mrs Thomas, a painter by profession, falls seriously ill ...”

“... among other things, to the truly astonishing performances she has managed to coax from previously unknown young actors. Arnold was appointed OBE in 2011. Who knows what honours are awarded for these days, but it’s reassuring to discover that an urban fox-themed depiction of cunnilingus won’t necessarily rule you out.Arnold’s second feature film, Fish ...”