“... a judgment that betrays their lack of self-awareness, and shows these men of knowledge to be unknown to themselves. How, then, should we judge our contemporary men of knowledge? For Gianni Vattimo, the death of God means the dissolution of any ultimate or absolute structures of value. Belief in God is simply one example of a more general human tendency ...”

“... nor does he address the new material on Lenin’s more bloodthirsty and ruthless side (see The Unknown Lenin, edited by Richard Pipes) or even the human side uncovered by Service. Lewin might also be called Leninist in his analysis of what went wrong with the Soviet Union: bureaucratism spoiled everything. ‘Bureaucracy’ has always been a dirty word in ...”

“... at the despised Poor Law hospitals, the poor whose children were smeared seriatim with lymph of unknown provenance, the poor who would find it hard to pay the fines levied on resisters, and the poor who went to prison if unable to find the cash. Small wonder, then, that working-class opponents saw the Acts as ‘class legislation’ – a form of tyranny ...”

“... It breeds two overlapping kinds of expertise. One is that of the botanist who gives a name to an unknown specimen with the help of published floras, their diagnostic keys, descriptions and illustrations, maybe even with knowledge gained from herbarium specimens. The other is the expertise of those who know trees through long familiarity, like the indigenous ...”

“... Whatever the medium, the corrosive sense of disquiet generated by the knowledge that you have unknown enemies lurking in the shadows hasn’t changed. Such attacks may have serious consequences, and this is formally recognised. Like their numberless digital counterparts, assaults on paper are a criminal offence. The Malicious Communications Act ...”

“... can’t conjecture ye meaning of this tho’ tis capable of sevral Interpretations.’ An unknown reader of Abel Evans’s The Apparition, a 1710 critique of the deist and republican Matthew Tindal, failed to complete all the gutted names but made up for it with an allegation in the margin that Tindal was known in Oxford for his ‘too great ...”

“... including Marlowe himself, was trying to imitate for at least the next five years, was practically unknown by the time of the Civil War. It is true that Tamburlaine-like barbarian conquerors, and even versions of Tamburlaine himself, did return to the stage after the playhouses reopened in 1660, but the protagonists of Restoration heroic tragedy tend to speak ...”

“... in treatment between the native-born and the naturalised. In practice, denaturalisation was unknown until the early 20th century. When Congress passed the first statutory denaturalisation provisions in 1906 and 1907, it was acting in the context of immigration law that linked citizenship to a particular view of equality in marriage. Since 1855, an ...”

“... the would-be bigshot, skilfully deflects the financial anxieties of Vonnegut, still largely unknown and supporting a large family. ‘Please do not do me out of my one good break,’ Vonnegut writes in all caps in 1966. ‘I couldn’t stand it. I get the break today or never, I’m 45 years old with six kids and a string of let downs, this time ...”

“... age and essential hypertension was rarely seen: it is now a common disease. Obesity was almost unknown in 1930 when Julian Huxley noted with amazement that ‘almost the only fat woman I saw in Africa’ worked in the Nairobi brewery. Now, however, ‘the towns of East Africa contain many fat upper-class Africans; their leaders seen on television are often ...”

“... ago the social assumptions of a chapter of Tom Jones. Pope wrote in a famous couplet: And who unknown defame me, let them be Scriblers or Peers, alike are Mob to me. The lines are more than a pointed scrambling of high and low ranks, like the juxtaposition of ‘Pimps, Poets, Wits, Lord Fanny’s, Lady Mary’s’, and I think they indicate more than ...”

“... actually born, in an ox-wagon driving in the Thirties of the last century steadily deeper into the unknown interior of Southern Africa. The ox-wagon was part of the small and ill-fated Liebenberg Trek.’ Compare the Jung book’s opening sentence: ‘I have known, perhaps, an unusual number of those the world considers great.’ ‘Perhaps’ is van der ...”

“... by grafting.’ The motives of converts were highly varied: those of missionaries going off into unknown lands were marginally less so. Patrick’s first acquaintance with Ireland was as a prisoner of war, as was that of Ulfilas with the Goths. Anskar’s arrival in Denmark came about because his host had been a political exile and took the apostle back with ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that in a democratic age civil society must rest on common membership of a national culture, is unknown to it. Gellner’s account is in large part avowedly historical and backward-looking, spending a good deal of time on why the Marxist project was such a ruinous failure in the Soviet Union. This is perhaps a pity, since it means he has little to say on ...”