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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... not dead etc’ but worried about the ‘infinite mischief’ of ‘mixing of fact and fiction in unknown proportions’. When Lowell was writing Life Studies, no one had stood up for his parents, who were dead. Tate had objected to the poems on aesthetic rather than moral grounds. Anyway, the dead can’t do a thing, whereas the living can write angry ...”

“... of influence. The final sections of Lescaze’s book are dedicated to this almost completely unknown tradition. ‘The Primitive World’ by Adolphe François Pannemaker (1857) A precursor​ to Soviet palaeoart is to be found in the State Historical Museum in Moscow. Victor Vasnetsov’s huge mural of early human life, Stone Age, painted for the ...”

“... the damned compulsively re-enacted their sins before being torn limb from limb. Such a sight, unknown in England, could have been suggested by the spectacular ruins of a Roman amphitheatre Thurkill had seen on his travels. Legassie’s engaging book concentrates on three kinds of travel, and on the literary records inspired by each: exotic voyages to the ...”

“... around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was. Cusk’s first novel appeared when she was 26, and a review of it on American Amazon reads: ‘Although this is an OK book, it is nothing like Bridget Jones except that both ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was a bastard. Cioran was horrible. Cioran was a disgusting fascist’ – addressing the unknown man as if he represented the late Romanian writer.Octavio and Marie-José (whom he always called Marie-Jo) were together until the end; perhaps they tried to remain together after he died, too. Marie-José used to say that she spoke to him every night in ...”