“... swamps that were spread out to dry like linen, the animals appeared, some familiar, some entirely unknown; it was like the banks of the Nile when the river wastes away and the fellaheen who turn up clogs of mud find a world half-dead, half-alive with crawling things, offspring of the marriage of warmth and water. Birds wheeled and cried on ...”

“... than superfluous detail. He brings us close to the living temper of a poet who is still fairly unknown to English-speakers but who, through his impact on T.S. Eliot, could claim to be the inventor of modern poetry. Laforgue’s short life was full of dramatic changes. Born in 1860 in Montevideo, he was brought to France at the age of six. (The 75-day ...”

“... One hypothesis which has been canvassed recently is that schizophrenia was a novel condition, unknown before the end of the 18th century, which spread as a slow, possibly viral epidemic across Europe and the United States in the 19th century, contributing in large measure to the vast increase in the population of asylums, and culminating in its ...”

“... glass of London brown-stout.’ Wolfgang Langewiesche took to the skies in the 1920s. ‘The most unknown thing in the United States,’ he wrote, ‘is the United States.’2 Unlike a passenger, idly consuming the landscape, he needed it for navigation. He called railway lines ‘the Iron Compass’. High-tension lines were particularly readable, but other ...”

“... rather than her public greatness … It is this passion for life, for her art and for something unknown beyond both, that was compelling her and driving her forever on.’ Miss Stassinopoulos worked hard at her research and unearthed three particularly enlightening sources. The first was Callas’s correspondence with her godfather, Leonidas Lantzounis, a ...”

“... housed the Suffolk Collection: 59 paintings – mostly royal and family portraits, many of them by unknown artists – amassed over a 400-year period by the Howard family.The jewel in the Suffolk Collection is a group of nine enormous, full-length portraits of members of the extended Howard family painted in the 1610s by the Jacobean portraitist William Larkin ...”

“... as the discreet object of someone else’s desire revives her feelings for her partner. The unknown leads her back to the deeper and more enduring mystery of the known; and the story ends with her delivering flowers to her partner – accompanied, naturally, by a blank card. ‘Virtual’ makes similar tentative links: a woman encounters a hospitalised ...”

“... you might say, from the hips while her head, motionless, schoons along on the pole of her neck. Unknown to Celia, her feet have the slightest of tendencies to indicate out; and this makes her endearing. She is brunette and wears her hair either down to her eyebrows or brushed back. But the hygiene of her head is more problematical: every fifth day her hair ...”

“... time. Who can name its transactions, the sense that fell through us of untouchable wind, unknown effort – one black mane? Anne Carson Funny you should mention a crow. For years light … for years light eluded me or stayed only a short time … something … what was it … heavy in me … a weight I couldn’t put down … How will you let her ...”

“... at any one of ten tangled junctions and poke your nose, without compunction,    into the unknown.    Get systematically lost. At the first absence of a signpost, opt for the least promising lane,    or cut into the truck traffic    along some plain, perimeter-fence-lined stretch of blacktop heading nowhere obvious.    Open your mind ...”

“... lots of traffic. The soundtrack is provided by the Residents, ‘the world’s most famous unknown band’, an anonymous group of avant-garde multimedia artists from San Francisco. At the very end we get to see the two unauthorised pictures of Pynchon. One of them is the handiwork of a hack called James Bone, who tracked the novelist down and took him ...”

“... hard. When you want to stick a finger in them, they react.’ ‘I think that everything is unknown,’ he said to André Malraux, ‘everything’s the enemy! Everything! Not just some things! – women, babies, animals, tobacco, games … Everything!’ It is this combination of domesticity and paranoia – of trust in the room and deep fear of the ...”

“... Souls are unreachable and unregarded: ‘living unloved’, her Sappho hopes only ‘to die unknown/Unwept, untended, and alone’. The dead sleep on, indifferent (‘I shall not see the shadows,/I shall not feel the rain,’ ‘Song’ promises). Being dead often seems little different to being alive. ‘When I was dead, my spirit turned/To seek the ...”

“... and instructive thing about it was its very novelty: the discovery of other human societies, unknown and unmediated by history, literature or oral tradition; the discovery of territories with a geological and climatic structure unlike any in Europe, and with an overwhelmingly strange and rich but quite unfamiliar flora and fauna – in some areas it ...”

“... So Domenico went off and pursued his usual rounds of pleasure in the city. But on his way back, unknown to him, Andrea was waiting round a street corner, and with some lead weights he smashed both Domenico’s lute and his stomach with one blow, and also struck him violently on the head with them. Then he ran off, leaving Domenico half dead on the ...”