“... bowl. London-Oxford-Cambridge. Undark had unearthed their quest. And offered something more: the unknown. He did not understand, this new destination was illegitimate. The wrong shape.’ Our three pointers, as you can see, are now, thanks to Undark, in the process of becoming four. But let us hold the psycho-geographical patternings, folding and unfolding ...”

“... of New Caledonia, 14 July will be marked by a pop concert by Johnny Clegg, ‘le Zoulou blanc’ (unknown in Britain, where, as a South African, he is banned from TV, but bigger than Springsteen or Michael Jackson in France). What would Danton have thought of the Revolution being commemorated by a left-wing South African singing Zulu rock in the South ...”

“... clash of stress with quantity produced difficulties – and sometimes metrical pleasures – unknown in Greek. By the time of Virgil the Romans had become accustomed to the Homeric hexameter, but it must still have felt grandly artificial, faintly alien. Horace’s Alcaics, Sapphics and the like, meanwhile, were, because newly adapted, vividly Greek. So ...”

“... draw on both published and manuscript sources for Eliot’s writing, including many that would be unknown except for Ricks’s commandingly wide reading in and around Eliot’s literary and philosophical contexts. In the notes for the single 16-line poem ‘Silence’, for instance, Ricks refers, with entire relevance, to the following authors and ...”

“... a senior police officer, long concerned with the Calabresi case, would have rushed off to meet an unknown crêpe vendor with no great story to tell. In fact, it’s clear from the transcripts that both Colonel Bonaventura and Manlio Minale, the President of the Assizes, inadvertently let slip that Calabresi’s murder had been discussed during those nocturnal ...”

“... might have been a set-up for a Soviet ambush. But at this stage, mark well, Chambers was still unknown outside literary circles and had made no charges against anyone. This excellent book is intended as a biography and not as a study of the Hiss-Chambers case (which has generated a vast secondary literature of its own). Tanenhaus simply makes the ...”

“... he had refused Chirac. For the next five years he held office. The appointment of a relatively unknown personality as prime minister had an excellent precedent in the Fifth Republic – that of Pompidou (who was also of la République de professeurs). But the Fourth and Third Republics, too, had had their unknowns (when journalists tried to find out ...”

“... writing in any age; the truly modern is always sublime, an encounter with something previously unknown – the enemy, in other words, of fashion; mode is the travesty of the modern, its high-wire a catwalk. Modern writing makes each particular hair to stand on end; as the Fat Boy says, ‘I wants to make your flesh creep.’ What’s the point of ...”

“... beach on an inaccessible island near Ko Samui, a legend among backpackers, isolated, unspoiled and unknown to the Lonely Planet Guide. Accompanied by a young French couple, Etienne and Françoise, Richard sets out to find it. In the course of the book we learn in detail about Richard’s taste in video games and the countries he has visited. We learn from him ...”

“... If Karla Abrahamsen had been, as Erik’s half-sisters later suspected, virtually raped by an unknown, it would explain why she would never speak of her son’s parentage; on the other hand, the circumstances of his conception may simply have been discreditable or humiliating. The silence allowed him as he grew up to invent a Danish nobleman or artist to ...”

“... the Western Front, Joe Bonham, the soldier in Trumbo’s novel, lies in a similar condition in an unknown hospital. The nurses’ hands, the vibrations caused by people walking around the ward, the pain of the sheets against his wounds are his only contact with the outside world. He is unable to separate the present from his hallucinations of the past: work ...”

“... red figures are, in their crowd, drifting about in various directions with an air of carrying out unknown but pedantic ...”

“... rewrite of The Dunciad. Yet the cadences of optimism in Pope’s Essay (‘All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;/All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see’) again and again echo Shaftesbury’s Theocles, with his certainty that ‘All is manag’d for the best, with perfect Frugality and just Reserve.’ In his less excited moments, his sayings can ...”

“... ward of fading matinee idols, consider this. He may be an obscure fogey to young TV viewers and an unknown quantity in college lit. courses (where his novels are considered too commercial for the syllabuses), but his political espousals have never been more in vogue on the activist front. His constant drumbeats against American imperialism, the corruption of ...”

“... which the student unconsciously learns as he goes on, but the main principles of which are as yet unknown to us’. I’m not in a position to report that indifference to theory has ceased. Most of the teaching of English is still, I imagine, a mixture of practical criticism, literary history, and intermittently the lore of politics and sociology. But it is ...”