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 But in the old man’s face fear in the face of the unknown has been replaced by the blankness of acceptance, while here the woman is no longer using her hands to help but only to try and comfort as she reaches out to touch the man on the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

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... on an idea or two between sets; although what most of them remembered – it was then virtually unknown – was the public encouragement of inter-racial sex. (Nevertheless, the tradition of apartheid was so strong that older musicians like Sidney Bechet forbade his sidemen to fraternise with white women even at Camp Unity, for fear that it might cost him ...”

“... gays and delinquents, Arenas denounced himself at a local police station where his name was unknown. He passed the Queer Walking Test, evaded the State Security net on the beach, nearly drowned – and was out. ‘Now I was in a plastic world, lacking all mystery, where loneliness was often much more invasive ... I knew I could not live in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... instrument to determine the position of an object such as a heavenly body. There was a real, true unknown value. If the measurements were unbiased, their average, or mean, would be that value, and the curve of error modelled the deviation around that real true value. 2. Biometric distributions. About fifty years later a Belgian astronomer, Quetelet, noted ...”

“... the Negro type,’ blustered another, adding that ‘with the latter, sexual restraint is almost unknown.’ The not unhappily named Karl Muck, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and one of a number of Germans imported to ensure that American musical life fulfilled its European destiny, felt moved to comment in almost urethral terms: ‘I think what ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is what has allowed him to prosper, or at least to survive. He has assured his companions that ‘unknown languages would create no problems, because when he had spoken with barbarians for a little while, he learned to speak as they did.’ There is much in this novel about languages, in particular about the way vernaculars and dialects fight it out with the ...”