“... 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 But in the old man’s face fear in the face of the unknown has been replaced by the blankness of acceptance, while here the woman is no longer using her hands to help but only to try and comfort as she reaches out to touch the man on the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 ...”

“... église, he muses perplexingly – not exactly the Wordsworthian insight into hidden justice and unknown modes of being that one was expecting. Violence and exhilaration are located somewhere behind the poem, but are suppressed by Muldoon’s diffidence, insulated, like his right arm, by the sleeve of glass that both protects and inhibits, and ‘has yet to ...”

“... internalises the novel’s action; Balzac grounds it in history; Flaubert researches the hitherto unknown territory of the everyday; in Kafka the open horizons of Cervantes and Diderot are replaced by a bureaucratic system as labyrinthine as it is unintelligible. In a professedly academic writer such summary treatments would seem hopelessly slapdash, but in ...”

“... playwrights of the first half of the 20th century, such as Benavente, Unamuno or Alberti, remain unknown, as playwrights, north of the Pyrenees; and no Spanish dramatist since the Civil War has produced anything even remotely comparable to El público (‘The Audience’ or ‘The Public’), Once Five Years Pass, Don Perlimplín, Doña Rosita the ...”

“... Even the Chinese mode of consuming alcohol was so well controlled that hangovers were virtually unknown. The large numbers of male prostitutes in evidence called for pity rather than censure, and for greater earnestness in praying for their salvation. Ricci’s harshest disapproval was directed at Buddhism, as being primitive and superstitious, and at the ...”

“... So when his Iranian translator, Mehrdad, says of the flags at the tombs of the thousands of unknown martyrs of the Iran-Iraq war, ‘Losing their colour. Losing its meaning’; or when the wounded veteran Arash, who had taken part in 11 advances in the Iran-Iraq war, says, ‘I still feel something’ and passes ‘a searching, caressing hand down his ...”

“... and prays to the genius of the place and to the earth; he also prays to ‘nymphs and rivers yet unknown’. Even prayers to a specific place and its spirit extend outwards to include places and rivers beyond his ken. Virgil’s Italo-Roman ideal recedes just beyond the horizon of knowledge, making a mystery of home for his readers and hero alike. As Jenkyns ...”

“... brutality, but Carswell thinks it was done for reasons of economy. It is true that it was not unknown for working-class brides to have their teeth extracted to save their husbands money later on: but the Herberts were far from working-class. The next thing they did was to stick Ivy into an office. The Prudential Assurance Company had just built its ...”

“... and proportioned, they are the culmination of many years’ thought and feeling. Yet they are unknown, partly because the publisher, who recently took over the series from Longmans and the British Council, has listed them so that they are regularly confused on the bookseller’s microfiche with Number 1 in the series, the out-of-date and out-of-print ...”

“... from the cooking-pot, thanks on the second occasion to a miraculous eclipse (such things are not unknown on Helliconia, either). Finally, Grace reclaims Father Laforgue and it appears that the Savages would, after all, be truer Christians for having been baptised. We end not with names but a Name: the ‘words of salvation’ and the text of a prayer. Moore ...”

“... surface of a turning planet. What to do but, like Michelangelo’s Adam, put my hand out into unknown space, hoping for the reciprocating touch? This is the end of ‘Threshold’, and of the book, a calculated symbolic moment which perhaps deliberately takes refuge in the mechanism of symbolism to avoid discussion, and to avoid the interpretation and ...”