“... with an extraordinary propensity to shoot itself in the foot, when Aneurin Bevan was still an unknown backbencher and Gaitskell a university lecturer. As the latest instalment of Ben Pimlott’s magisterial edition of Hugh Dalton’s diaries reminds us, the current leadership’s dismay at the vagaries of the ‘loony Left’ has plenty of precedents from ...”

“... a long time, though in the last decade there have been attempts to revive it. The date of death is unknown, but it was ill before the Union of the Crowns; it then became mortally ill, and it did not last out the 17th century, except for an occasional later curiosity. Modern Scots can hardly be called a language: a linguist who was oblivious to politics might ...”

“... action; Chase a 455 Webley; Burroughs loves guns). Both died simultaneously by rifle-fire from an unknown third party. Hall, it is reported, wrote under the pen-name and in the person of Kim Carsons, the famous Western shootist, and subsequently the central character of The Place of Dead Roads. From this initial point, the narrative spills out like some nasty ...”

“... barely a few per cent of the whole mass of work he did; the rest remained unpublished, and unknown even to his students. Wilson mentions that Rutherford’s failures sometimes drove him to black despair. His 1909 model of the atom failed to explain why the electrons do not fall into the nucleus to neutralise its charge. Niels Bohr took up this ...”

“... at which the dead man revives, a funeral turned into a voodoo carnival. Similar things are not unknown in Ireland, where Terry Eagleton’s self-consciously carnivalesque first novel is set. Saints and Scholars begins with a drably journalistic reconstruction of the execution of James Connolly at Kilmainham gaol in 1916. The opening pages are clumsily ...”

“... Self the change speeded up remarkably during the Romantic period. Of course it is rare (though not unknown) for a poet to abandon his or her youthful work entirely; it may be thought of as juvenilia, failing to meet the standards of the mature writer: still, though only faintly, relevant, still not quite dispensable. It may find a place in an appendix. And we ...”

“... taken after booking, one officer joked with his victim about the ‘hardball’ they had played. Unknown to the police, 81 seconds of their beating of King had been videotaped by a resident in a nearby apartment, George Holliday. What Holliday did with the tape was momentous. He did not hand it over to the Police. Had he done so, there would have been an ...”

“... of the Durham miners, was able to claim, not inaccurately: Poverty has been abolished. Hunger is unknown. The sick are tended. The old folks are cherished, our children are growing up in a land of opportunity. Further, this miracle (for so it seemed to those who, a little older than Peter Hennessy, had grown up in the Thirties) had been accomplished with a ...”

“... that put up the South Bronx, street number after street number, the mailbox pried open, recipient unknown, moved on, shot down – and has made of it this byword, this burnt-out, roofless, windowless testimonial to systems gone rotten. Yet even as she attempts to write the poem of today’s New York, Clampitt knows that she can see the new immigrants only en ...”

“... a scandal that a body of writing of this substance, composed on this island, should be so largely unknown to readers of strict literary interests. A general impression from Matthew Arnold will not do. The major verse of Dafydd ap Gwilym and the romances of Pedair Cainc y Mabinogi (in English the Mabinogion) are evident classics in the writing of this ...”

“... contemplating images of the Madonna and child, is broody. Like Colin restlessly envisioning his unknown father, Edwin wonders whether his meagre life might be transformed by a child. ‘If he and Cecilia had had children, if they had a daughter, would their lives be different? Would there be more meaning in the antics which were part of the daily ...”

“... and died later that day of ‘cerebral congestion’. He was 74 and by this time virtually unknown – a few lines in the daily papers were the only acknowledgment of his death. As an artist, Fragonard had often been at odds with the culture of his day. He took up the Rococo idiom decades after it had gone out of fashion, appearing to his ...”

“... riches. From the rooftop, his fellow citizens on the street below appear to be ‘propelled by an unknown force … pulled on a transparent string by a concealed hand’. Close up, however, it’s evident that they contract their muscles and shift their weight to move ‘in the direction they wish to go’. Blam is curious about each of them, ‘infant, girl ...”

“... the grand materials and he certainly isn’t harvesting. The word ‘landscape’ would have been unknown to the Gawain poet; its first recorded use is at the end of the 16th century. Landscape in Gawain is not so much an entity in itself as an absence. It is a place devoid of community, a place that shows Gawain he is separated from his society, and also ...”

“... lightly handled, showing a dazzling control of detail across a vast range of places, many of them unknown to modern Anglophone scholarship. David Wallace shows us a regenerated, shockingly unfamiliar, cosmopolitan, dynamic and various ...”