“... Saidulaev.’ A reasonable plan – except that Saidulaev is not a military man, is virtually unknown in Chechnya, and has no leverage on Basaev. Zakaev, the last pro-independence leader to hold talks with a Moscow politician (in 2001), said that it was pointless to think of negotiating with Moscow after the killing of Maskhadov and while Putin was still ...”

“... document the life of an exhibited freak. The authors’ luck in discovering so much hitherto unknown information seems, in a way, a spin-off from the good fortune that distinguished the last years of Merrick’s life from the fate of most freaks. It was the mere accident of his being shown for twopence in a vacant shop across the road from the London ...”

“... in 1789 (our sophisticated doubts about the Revolution being ‘victorious’ in any sense were unknown even a couple of decades ago). ‘Losers’ (the Papacy, rulers who failed to carry out reforms, social conservatives with uncomprehended points of view) got bad marks and less attention. The received notion of the 18th century, in fact, was a typical ...”

“... Higley and his co-authors identified 418 members of a central circle, invisible and indeed unknown to its members but a social fact nevertheless, they assure us, ‘in the sense that each of its many members was linked to at least two others who were directly linked themselves’. This circle, although it excluded the unsociable leaders of trades ...”

“... its legs off the ground and not fall over. The alternative view would be that there are (as yet unknown) laws of form or development which permit only certain kinds of organisms to exist – for example, organisms with internal skeletons, dorsal nerve cords and four legs, or with external skeletons, ventral nerve cords and six legs – and which forbid all ...”

“... Judenkaiser, didn’t inspire great art; portraits of him exist, but they are pedestrian and by unknown artists. The Jews who figure in so many of Rembrandt’s greatest paintings are, with a single exception, not individuals but social types: the old Jew, the young Jew, the Jewish bride. So when the Rothschilds, the Cahen d’Anvers and the British ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is all this ‘repetitive’ DNA doing? No doubt much of it will turn out to perform some as yet unknown function useful to the organism. The novel suggestion is that much of it may be ‘selfish’, or ‘parasitic’. A cell is full of enzymic machinery for replicating DNA. Dawkins suggests that DNA molecules, which, unlike typical genes, contribute ...”

“... false views. Hungarians, however, to use a phrase of Endre Ady – a great poet still largely unknown abroad, and yet the equal of Baudelaire or Apollinaire – a phrase that is oft quoted in Hungary, want to be ‘seen, seeing’.   Here we are right at the centre of the Gordian knot. What I have in mind is translation ... Europa is a Budapest ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”