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“... enclosed it in a fortress of words’ (Christa Wolf). Writing is facing the truth, which cannot be unknown but only forgotten: it is ‘the enemy of forgetfulness, of thoughtlessness. For the writer there is no oblivion. Only endless memory.’ This is something Look at Me painfully reiterates. But writing is also, like everything else, subject to change ...”

“... we’re told in the introduction to A Voyager Out. ‘In the United States she has been largely unknown.’ This is all to the advantage of Katherine Frank, a lecturer from Iowa, who has produced this fine biography. Mary Kingsley was the daughter of George Kingsley, the younger brother of Charles. The DNB gallantly falsifies the date of George’s ...”

“... between Newton and Einstein, even if, to the public at large, Maxwell’s name seems to be almost unknown. Perhaps it says something about our cultural values that, in informed society, people may never have heard of a scientist such as Maxwell when even a British schoolboy would be considered grossly uneducated if he had never heard of Dickens. The ...”

“... small wax models, as well as the ‘pair statues’ of ancient Egypt who seem resolved to face an unknown future together and alone. Many of Moore’s late large works, and especially the more massive of them, seem inflated: his earliest sculpture was more consistently grand in conception, even when small in size. The subjects of his finest pre-war sculptures ...”

“... since it cannot leap over an intervening piece), and that there is a piece called the Cannon unknown to other forms of chess: and that is all. It would surely have been of interest to describe the powers of the Cannon, which introduces a radically new idea into chess: it has the same move as our Rook, but can capture only by leaping over one intervening ...”

“... has hit upon a truth about modern travellers. They are not tracing a route from the known to the unknown. Their motives for travelling are varied and often oblique. Ms Murphy’s admission that ‘our treks are just playing at hardship’ in no way lessens the skill and satisfaction of her book. It records a journey with her nine-year-old ...”

“... Burrows, one of the many girls who seem to have fallen irrevocably in love with him when he was an unknown youth. Now, it seems, those of us who live long enough will eventually be able to peruse The Letters of D.H. Lawrence in no less than eight volumes, of which the one under review is the first. It contains 579 pages. Since the last volume of the series ...”

“... to Empedocles, an attribution of which Mayor makes short work, since elephants were unknown to Empedocles, who wrote in the fifth century BC. Living animals of the elephant kind were only ‘discovered’ in Africa by the Greeks a century later. Many centuries later still, Boccaccio witnessed the unearthing of a comparable skeleton in a cave in ...”

“... let down by some of his authors. What he was not was a gifted writer. Walter Scott, ‘The Great Unknown’ of the anonymous Waverley novels, was known to the point of dedication by many Scots, who did not mind that he had no taste (as an Episcopalian) for the national religion, or for clergymen, that he was an enthusiast for birth and breeding, and that he ...”

“... called Mirralon (a mysterious medium that looks like silvery plastic foil, but is apparently unknown to Google), communicative coherence breaks down. Typed text becomes carved relief, with each keystroke simultaneously fixing and cancelling the message it engraves. Who would imagine that as an artist types up a few thoughts on the art world, the ...”

“... runs, one must see many cities, men and things . . . One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings . . . And still it is not yet enough to have memories . . . Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance and gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves – not till ...”

“... Our laws​ are unfortunately not widely known, they are the closely guarded secret of the small group of nobles who govern us. We like to believe that these old laws are scrupulously adhered to, but it remains a vexing thing to be governed by laws one does not know. I am not thinking here of various questions of interpretation and the disadvantages that stem from only a few individuals and not the population as a whole being involved in their interpretation ...”

“... this: ‘The evils produced by his wickedness were felt in lands where the name of Prussia was unknown; and in order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of North America.’ ‘Evil’? ‘Wickedness’? The ability to employ these terms ...”

“... very long chain of tenuous inferences fraught with huge uncertainties in every link beginning with unknown base-case GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions; then compounded by huge uncertainties about how available policies and policy levers transfer into actual GHG emissions; compounded by huge uncertainties about how GHG-flow emissions accumulate via the carbon ...”

“... only a legal term after the late 17th century?) but which means only a very large (but unknown) number of abject poor living together, for whom property was not an issue, as they possessed none at all anyway. Property, in this account, is the point of both marriage and divorce, and that is why Stone quite properly draws constant attention to the ...”