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“... glory of the nation state were both satisfied. He brought to his subject a moral seriousness quite unknown in England at the time. During his visit he nevertheless hoped to meet someone who occupied a professional position in London similar to his own in Berlin. One possible equivalent was John Nash, the royal architect: had they met, their interview would ...”

“... starting around 300 BC. Whether Amaravati was intentionally destroyed or simply fell to pieces is unknown. The first record of it is in 1797, when Colonel Colin Mackenzie, later Surveyor-General of India, visited the site and describe ‘a great low mound, the upper part of which rose in a turreted shape to the height of twenty feet’, with a diameter at the ...”

“... None of these statements seems true. As for 1. there are lives in which humiliation is a rare or unknown occurrence, and in which fear of humiliation is not a major consideration. As for 2. there are many areas of normal life where humiliation is not a serious threat, and some less normal areas where it is impossible. (It is impossible in the case of sexual ...”

“... the fact that the Stoics, in particular, recognised unconscious operations of the mind that were unknown to earlier philosophy, we are surely bound to find the Epicureans too rationalistic, the Sceptics too procedurally self-obsessed, the Stoics (at least in their Roman incarnation) too unyieldingly pompous for us to take entirely seriously, not just their ...”

“... Hell consigned to ruin, Whose friend was God, but God swore not to aid me! – and the, to me, unknown poem by Ivor Gurney, addressed to God, which he wrote in Barnwood Mental Hospital, as much as a portrayal of what used to be done to patients in the name of sanity as of the insanity itself: Why have you made life so intolerable And set me between four ...”

“... steep Beyond the limits which my feet had trod, Was like a guide into eternity, At least to things unknown and without bound. That brings before us what roads once were, and are no longer: as so often with Wordsworth, the hiatus between past and present seems complete, the nature of lakes and mountains having changed more subtly but as completely as that of ...”

“... devised by Burton himself shortly before his death, can be translated (I think): ‘Known to few, unknown to fewer, here lies Democritus Junior, to whom Melancholy gave life and death.’ The words are designedly of Delphic obscurity. They mean, we guess, that no one really knew Burton despite his fame, and that the black humour from which he made a ...”

“... proletarian, and – though this condition might be varied when demand outpaced supply – unknown to Tom before the encounter. I still wish I had listened more attentively to the stories he told about those who, like him, yearned for anonymous sex and its corollary, which was, as he hurried to point out excitedly, dangerous sex. (Certainly, I wasn’t ...”

“... absolutists for whom René Char’s question is a living demand: ‘how can we live without the unknown before us?’ The answer is ‘we’ cannot, and that impossibility contains an awful series of catastrophic microhistories – madnesses, suicides, ruined souls and ruined bodies for whom, in Guy Debord’s words, ‘oblivion is our ruling ...”

“... experience of every reader of The Golden Bough – embarking on a journey into a frightening and unknown world, then returning safely to familiar civilisation, but now with a heightened awareness of the taboos and constraints of their own culture. In The Great Taboo, The Golden Bough shows its true colours as a voyage of exploration. There were, of ...”

“... social élite of Rouen duly assembled to listen to a lengthy speech in praise of his achievements. Unknown to the original audience, the speech had been written by Flaubert. It is an impeccable piece of ironic mischief, worth reading for its mimicry of the official high style, which Flaubert so detested, and for its oblique expression of his deepest feelings ...”

“... example of the re-intellectualisation of Conservatism that recent years have witnessed. Once unknown, this long-serving prime minister replaces Disraelian situationist tactics with something like a fundamental position. The admirable essays in Salisbury: The Man and his Policies help us to see what that was. This elegant, even intimate collection of ...”

“... suppressed by the authorities. Finally there is Adolphe, the most Svejk-like of these three Unknown Non Soldiers. He is the Good German who joins up and finds himself taking part in a massacre of Belgian villagers, whereupon he deserts his regiment and, in his turn, gets himself shot. At the beginning the three were all on their way to a dance, and ...”

“... again placed to one side of the background. But in the old man’s face fear in the face of the unknown has been replaced by the blankness of acceptance, while here the woman is no longer using her hands to help but only to try and comfort as she reaches out to touch the man on the shoulder and he seems oblivious to this contact. A friend recently widowed ...”

“... precisely this kind of collapse of the orderer’s boundaries, beyond which lurk the freakish and unknown, immune to our formulations of their being. Or as the Loch Ness monster puts it in a famous earlier poem, ‘Sssnnnwhuffffll?’ George Szirtes is a less frolicsome poet than Morgan, and his new volume, Metro, has him dealing with particularly grim ...”