“... of my body, I offer to you, so that my soul will be saved.’ According to Yovel, ‘this is unknown in Judaism, where human blood does not save.’ But if you open an Orthodox prayerbook for Yom Kippur, whether at Musaf, the final part of the morning prayer service, or the liturgical poems, or the silently recited Amida, you will find references to ...”

“... the discussion of The Autumn of the Patriarch, a novel ostensibly about an unnamed dictator in an unknown Latin American country. This ‘poem on the solitude of power’, as García Márquez called it, is also, as Martin remarks, a novel that ‘confronted the pitfalls of fame and power before they had even fully engulfed him’. Still, it is hard to escape ...”

“... attributed to the publisher, Pratap Chandra Roy (who was made a CBE), and Ganguli’s name was unknown. The curse is working (as Anna Russell used to say of Wagner’s Ring). John Smith, earlier the author of a fine translation and study of the medieval Hindi Epic of Pabuji, is the latest to take up the challenge. He may escape the curse because his ...”

“... of this work, in which Moses weeps as he leaves the care of the woman who has nursed him, and who, unknown either to him or to Pharaoh’s daughter, is his natural mother. His mother weeps too, as she receives her nurse’s wages and relinquishes her boy. The scene, explains Einberg, parallels ‘the procedures of the institution itself: babies, abandoned in ...”

“... 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 ...”