“... 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 ...”

“... enablers abroad. Unlike the domestic perpetrators of violence, who have names and faces, these unknown others operate in the shadows – which makes it all the easier for them to grow crude and monstrous in the imagination.As agitprop, People’s Justice isn’t complex. On the right are the simple citizens, villagers and workers: victims of the regime. On ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Ferdinando Marsigli, soldier of fortune and Fellow of the Royal Society, must by now be almost unknown. Born in 1658, and surviving until 1730, he made something of a stir in his lifetime, and was the subject of two 18th-century biographies. Since then, he has not exactly been the focus of historical attention, although his memoirs were published in 1930 ...”

“... a degree. In the rest of Europe, where tutorials and well-structured three-year degree courses are unknown, the figure is nearer 50 per cent, and those who finish often take five years and more to get their first degree. Finally, these universities are cheap: the unit of resource in Britain – that is, the total cost of universities divided by the number of ...”

“... work is the indeterminacy of its outcome. Every research project is essentially a step into the unknown. On the other hand, research projects have to be planned and executed with meticulous care. There is no human artefact so exquisitely designed as a space probe or particle accelerator. Big science experiments demand the co-ordinated efforts of people who ...”

“... up over the last twenty years. They are still turning up: this volume contains letters, formerly unknown, to Robert Mountsier, who later became Lawrence’s agent in the US, and a batch to Douglas Goldring. The volume covers an interesting period. The Lawrences were having a bad time in Cornwall up to October 1917, when they were expelled by the police. Then ...”

“... human depravity which nurture every generation’s belief that standards are sinking to previously unknown depths. At the level of high art it is a crucible in which to purge the dross of events and distil essences of truth. Novelists find courtroom proceedings a valuable device for bringing a story to a head and a conclusion: but in real life a judgment or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... careful explanation of 18th-century journalism, Brewer assumes that this sort of farrago is quite unknown today. In fact, it is strikingly familiar. With its dubious mixture of information, entertainment and prurient gossip, the English press astonishes foreign visitors now just as much as it did then. The ‘puff’, the piece of promotional copy ...”

“... commas and is under the misapprehension that the time and place of her subject’s birth are unknown. Fluttering her inverted commas, she asserts that the ‘missing “birth” ’ is an impediment to what she calls, with a further flutter and the cosy nomenclature she observes throughout, the ‘search for Aphra’s “identity” ’. There are some ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of a Chinese hand, includes a phrase corresponding exactly to our ‘terra incognita’, a label unknown to Chinese cartography. David Selbourne was probably unaware of these fakes when he embarked on his translation of the text he now entitles The City of Light, but it is worth pointing them out, just to make clear that the notion that Italian manuscripts ...”

“... assault. By 11 o’clock the radio had announced that it was instead an industrial accident, of unknown extent but substantial. I left home to walk fast to my daughter’s school. A different manifestation of alarm had begun to spread in the streets: scarves over the faces of pedestrians and cyclists, quickly succeeded by surgical masks. There were rumours ...”