“... a side hustle as a poet, moving in a literary world where he is neither a celebrity nor entirely unknown. Brief references to his activity as a writer, alongside a scattering of erudite quotations, imply that he has a more cultivated sensibility than most fictional detectives – but they hardly qualify him as a poetic soul. He never really wavers from his ...”

“... before Richard Greener’s sudden departure on a consular appointment to Vladivostok in 1898 is unknown. But by 1900, Genevieve had dropped the final ‘r’ of her surname and taken on a new middle name, Van Vliet (evoking the old Dutch names of New York’s white upper classes), while Belle and her brother, who had darker complexions than their ...”

“... him when he took off into the fields to paint. Degas expressed the desire to be ‘illustrious yet unknown’, but Monet probably achieved this better than Degas. Wullschläger’s biography describes him excellently and makes shrewd deductions, while leaving a hard centre of unknowability (of which Monet would doubtless have approved). His early life, of ...”

“... was never captured or betrayed, despite the large bounty on his head. His burial place remains unknown, and in Welsh folk memory he enjoys a reputation comparable to King Arthur. Meanwhile the English Prince of Wales (soon to be Henry V, victor of Agincourt) displayed his own heroism in a fight with the rebel Harry Percy, better known as Hotspur. In a ...”

“... trust he soon entered its employ, undertaking a secret mission in England whose nature remains unknown to this day. While abroad, however, Hamann began leading what he later called a shamefully dissolute life, which eventually drove him into a deep spiritual crisis and psychological collapse. He left his job and, on 13 March 1758, locked himself in a cheap ...”

“... under the Roman Empire. Undeterred, Ginzburg tells us that behind the hero depicted by Homer, and unknown to him, a prior god of the dead ‘has been discerned’, of Scythian stock. The figure of Theseus, pervasively connected to the sea, exhibited no physical defect at all. Ginzburg nonetheless enlists him for his construction on the grounds that he lifted ...”

“... the poem also has power to mirror the mysterious intercrossing laws of relationship, of person to unknown person and of forgotten past to present, all the strange conditions, hindered and unhindered, in which the natural and the fruitful are at work in human life. The twenty years of adulthood it has taken Dockery (whoever he is) to beget a son, and the son ...”

“... posted growth rates of about 8 per cent a year. Post-crash Argentina, however, enjoyed advantages unknown in the eurozone: a titanic exporter of foodstuffs, it stood on the brink of a commodities boom, and also had the friendship of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, who financed his fellow left populists in Buenos Aires on generous terms. Whether or not class ...”

“... to terror. She wrote to Lowell about her ‘passion for accuracy’: ‘Since we do float on an unknown sea I think we should examine the other floating things that come our way carefully; who knows what might depend on it.’ She worried about anything which might be overlooked (‘no detail too small’), or not noticed properly, or exaggerated, or let ...”

“... a country house in Normandy in August 1939, explores the bookshelves and finds a slim volume by an unknown author, Hugo Vernier, entitled The Winter Journey. As Degrael reads, he hears echoes, and eventually it occurs to him that the unknown work is a tissue of thefts, drawing on the full range of fin-de-siècle writing ...”

“... In​ the autumn of 1928, a previously unknown painting turns up on the London art market. It belongs to a Major Henry Howard of Surrey. He is 45 years old. His father has just died and left him a large estate, and he’s selling off much of it – houses, land, family heirlooms. There are death duties; he has five young daughters and a marriage that’s going to end soon ...”

“... seriousness. It seemed to have survived – like a dense, tooth-breaking wafer – from some unknown time and place. I asked my mother, only slightly babyishly, to ask my grandmother if I could have it – for my new collection of oddments, begun when our plane had stopped in Iceland for refuelling and my mother bought me a ceramic puffin from the tiny ...”

“... Ulisse is an Odysseus turned inside out, one who in old age longs only to venture out upon unknown seas. But, most clamorously of all, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, his one play about America, demands to be included, from the first, idyllic phase in which Caliban is taught to speak, and is shown the Man in the Moon, to the attempted rape of Miranda and ...”

“... our Castilian language,’ and contemptuously reproached his flock for maintaining their ‘rough, unknown tongues’. But even these accommodations to Madrid availed very little. In 1795 clerics accused of grave offences were assigned to the jurisdiction of civil courts. In 1803, a royal decree ordered the sale of all Church property in Nueva España, with ...”

“... portfolio at the Foreign Office in 1960: ‘His views on this vital aspect of UK policy are unknown and he has never had a chance to show in public whether he has any.’ Heath warmed to his task. He was dubbed ‘Mr Europe’ when Britain’s application to join the European Community was announced in August 1961. He lived up to the name, pressing ...”