“... the latest food snobbery, and it published fiction and other imaginative writing by young, largely unknown writers. It asked a lot of its readers: there was no talking down, no faux-democratic bonhomie, no embarrassed disguising of the sometimes recondite intellectual sources on which it drew. Although its founding editors – Keith Gessen, Mark ...”

“... being such a good sport’ – and for still being around to receive the praise. It isn’t unknown for a son to pay tribute while his father is still alive – Roddy Doyle did it (to both parents) in Rory and Ita (2002) – but it’s usually death that provides the spur. All the things that went unspoken in his lifetime (‘Died before we’d done ...”

“... new species could only occur as the result of a large leap. Working at the same time as Darwin but unknown to him, the Moravian monk Gregor Mendel discovered the mechanism that he could not. Mendel showed in breeding studies that the colour and shape of sweet-peas was transmitted from one generation to the next by what he called ‘hidden determinants’. The ...”

“... to the Gulf, so its relationships with Iran and Iraq were paramount. Qasem’s loyalties were unknown: he declared himself an Arab nationalist in the mould of Nasser, but to which bloc would he turn for protection? Washington was suspicious of his apparent neutrality – non-alignment didn’t mesh with either side’s ‘you’re either with me or ...”

“... Platonov’s protagonists, always seem in danger of running out of steam before they reach their unknown or impossible destinations. Platonov is Russia’s great prose poet of revolutionary entropy. I first read Platonov in Moscow in the 1960s at the behest of my Old Bolshevik mentor Igor Aleksandrovich Sats. Sats had been a great friend of ...”

“... any event; nobody well-known was born or died that year.’ Until quite late in life he played the unknown hero, the man whose obscurity – sometimes replaced by rapid mobility – was part of his fame. ‘Were I a writer, and dead, how I would love it if my life, through the pains of some friendly and detached biographer, were to reduce itself to a few ...”

“... a funhouse distortion of Alice’s. He too has been selected out of a crowd and pulled aside for unknown reasons: in his case, for holding dual citizenship in the US and Iraq. He was born in American airspace on an Iraqi Airways flight, which is enough for him to constitute a threat to the post-9/11 security state. After he is questioned, his baggage ...”

“... man seems to feel himself really living for the first time, enjoying, in a plenitude until then unknown to him, the wholeness of his health in his soul and body. Finally he breathes, free from all the ties with this humanity which ends up disappearing in front of his eyes, so small even in its greatest achievements – the works of giants, the labours of ...”

“... went their different ways; Eric drops out of the historical record, his date and place of death unknown. In Blacklock’s version Eric becomes a gambler and a speculator during the Gold Rush, which makes him a rebellious reflection of the eldest brother, George, a mining engineer. It is the third son, William, who has the furthest to fall. When Sebastian ...”

“... the other one: it appears to ‘possess a directional memory, although the basis of this memory is unknown’.‘Solving mazes and complex routing problems are non-trivial exercises,’ Sheldrake writes. ‘This is why mazes have long been used to assess the problem-solving abilities of many organisms, from octopuses to bees to humans.’ Fungi ace these ...”

“... demeanour of the era’s science. ‘We wander through a world of tiny creatures till now unknown, as if it were a newly discovered continent of our globe,’ wrote the intellectual and diplomat Constantijn Huygens not long after the microscope’s invention. The ‘amusement’ with which Leeuwenhoek would likewise ‘wander’ out of town, waiting ...”

“... rather than a lapse into sentiment, that – after an encounter with a gentlemanly student who is, unknown to Karen, her long-lost brother – the novel ends with a lengthy, absurdly contrived recognition-and-reconciliation sequence in which the virtuous young heroine finds out that she’s rich, white and two years younger than she’s been led to ...”

“... are somehow specially designed to do this, with data-handling or hypothesis-formulating ability of unknown character and complexity.’ Chomsky has spent sixty years exploring this undiscovered country. The project required a focus on what Chomsky eventually called the I-language of internal, individual structures of meaning rather than the E-language of ...”

“... revamping of old traditions to innovative ends by practical politicians working, step by step, in unknown territory, and with little in common save personal ambition and an abiding distrust of one another’s motives. This last factor offers a compelling reason for the resort to slave administrators. Athenian political factions were never notable for their ...”

“... two months. A colleague in my office lost her cousin last month because he was kidnapped by an unknown group who called her family and asked for 15 million Syrian pounds as a ransom’ – about $6000 – ‘but the family didn’t have the money to pay. He was found dead on the outskirts of a village in the Latakia countryside on the way to Hama.’ As ...”