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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Katherine Mansfield’s work is still largely unknown in this country. Her life flickered on the margins of British literary modernism, with friends among the Garsington and Bloomsbury set, but she was always the outsider, the traveller, always on the move. There’s nothing about Mansfield that’s institutional ...”

“... skirts of the other’. Though the details of Teufelsdröckh’s birth and (possible) death are unknown, his life and experiences give a certain authority to his teaching. This provides a thin narrative thread, more fragmentary legend than biography. It is mainly embedded in the second of the book’s three sections. Diogenes Teufelsdröckh is a mysterious ...”

“... 175 sketchbooks which Picasso had hoarded, and which were unstudied, and in many cases entirely unknown, when he died. We admire brisk notes made of Paris nightlife at the turn of the century, and then our attention is arrested by six drawings which include no topical reference at all. They represent a female nude kneeling, facing a larger, shadowy, seated ...”

“... which I have not got; the penultimate word, as Malcolm Bradbury remarked, is bazoom, a vulgarism unknown to Murray. Before that there is bazooka, also unknown in those more innocent times. Bazoo, however, a sort of trumpet, was around in 1877, but Murray missed it. However, he has bazil, an obsolete form of ...”

“... tells the life stories of four unhappy exiles, is the work of a German writer until now almost unknown in this country. It has already scooped up prizes in continental Europe and been published to great acclaim both in Britain and America. The epithets which have been flung at it include sober, delicate, beautiful, moving, powerful, mysterious, civilised ...”