“... compositions, he accuses Cassandra Austen of censorship because she was seen to destroy an unknown number of her sister’s letters after her death. However, he himself advances the reasonable hypothesis that what Cassandra, not dishonourably, destroyed referred to the death of her own fiancé, and points out that what seem gaps in the sequence of the ...”

“... with the evacuation and forced march of the prisoners away from the Russian advance towards an unknown destination. Three of these sections are concerned with journeys, but it is only the last that takes us away from base-camp. The isolatable escape-story in Part Three trades very skilfully on a whole lot of familiar anxieties, anticipations and ...”

“... German spy who misunderstood Wodehouse and landed in Britain wearing spats – accessories almost unknown outside the Drones Club. This may be true, I suppose. What is certain is that British readers liked to believe that only they could understand their national humorist. Consider the wartime movie, Pimpernel Smith, in which the stupid and wicked German ...”

“... he let himself be put on the defensive or feel obliged to try to justify his work in terms of the unknown directions which literature might take once the revolution had taken place? Why did he not simply say merde to his Maoist critics? Perhaps one should not try to explain Sartre’s readiness to be manipulated entirely in terms of his declining health. His ...”

“... not the keen sword that cuts into the bleeding tissues, but the hand that wields it – the unseen unknown something, or person, that manifests itself in the horrible workings of nature. So, at the climax of Hudson’s celebrated romance, God is offered to us as a kind of psychopathic gaucho: and those literal gauchos described elsewhere are, we may ...”

“... opportunistic standpoint it could hardly have been more successful. In two and a half years the unknown Frost had become a recognised writer, and his work had won the respect of many of the leading poets writing in English. By the time he left for home, two of his books were in print in England (North of Boston having appeared in 1914), and he had arranged ...”

“... squalor and destitution into which the Highland population fell, or the hardships of travel to unknown countries, created more misery than was common in the large industrial cities during depression, yet the distress of the urban poor in the early decades of industrialisation, resulting, as did the Clearances, from the combination of economic change and ...”

“... learned discussion of art in the past. The sort of art-historical industry familiar today was not unknown prior to the 19th century, but it lacked the prestige it now commands. In 1660, for example, the French philosopher and essayist Samuel de Sorbière wrote the following on the subject of the amateur art historians in and around the Royal Academy of ...”

“... the authority of the explorer. The space through which old-time explorers moved was by definition unknown, and those at home depended on them not only to describe but also to interpret it. Explorers could speak and write with almost orphic power: their voices seemed to come from other worlds, geographically of this world, but often so remote as to seem ...”

“... of his art, the pathos of incompleteness, of being unfulfilled.’ And, we might add, of being unknown. A Simple Story starts with a death and ends with a birth. When Hirshl Hurvitz’s second son is born, Hirshl’s unhappiness seems finally to pass out of him, and with it the subject-matter for the story. That story is set in motion by the death of Blume ...”

“... great security.’ The progress of the book is towards an ever graver sympathy with the all-but-unknown person of the landlord, a progress towards the acknowledgment that the dereliction (stubborn repeated word) of the estate need not constitute a dereliction of duty. There is nothing morbid in Naipaul’s admission, ‘I liked the decay, such as it ...”

“... really do things together. Mutuality, reciprocity, the give and take of ordinary affection are unknown to them. And they are unable to see things from other people’s point of view – empathy, too, like warmth and spontaneity, being a ‘positive indicator’ of mental health. As children the autistic or those thought to be suffering from what was soon ...”

“... close to him. One Sunday in September 1988, under the junta that replaced the Duvalier regime, unknown assailants wearing red armbands and carrying machine guns and machetes came to the church of St Jean Bosco where Aristide was saying mass. Soldiers and policemen stood by as the assailants began slicing through the white-garbed congregants and went for ...”

“... from subversive grandees of the Cavendish Laboratory were not shocked by these affiliations. An unknown refugee in 1938, Broda, was vouched for by Sir William Bragg, president of the Royal Society, on the strength of having been the assistant of a Viennese physical chemist whose work Bragg thought well of. In 1942, James Chadwick, though well aware of Nunn ...”

“... the will to engage with life through shattering bereavement, illness and social change on a scale unknown in living memory to any of her contemporaries, turned out to be a vital resource and not just for herself but for the royal family and so to some extent for Britain. The First World War broke out on her 14th birthday. At first it meant little more than ...”