“... since – the novel refuses us the pleasure of a landing, the actual surface of the moon remains unknown, only glimpsed by the three crew members. This allows Verne to avoid making any blunders about what the surface is really like. And perhaps the book’s real originality lies in allowing the reader to imagine viewing the Earth from space; this is the ...”

“... whose ‘names don’t survive’ and whose impressions of Elizabethan and Jacobean England remain unknown. Moreover, as Working observes, ‘even in the rare moments when such women are visible, they do not speak in their own words. Still, the work of recovery is vital.’ In describing the way early modern women ‘viewed and admired Indigenous-made weaves ...”

“... purpose of San Pedro’s most famous alkaloid, the psychoactive compound mescaline, is unknown, but humans have been aware of its effects for thousands of years. When boiled down into a brew and ingested, it activates an alternative experience of consciousness.‘No mind-altering substance has been described more thoroughly and from such a variety ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... one big box in the attic filled with my publications, press clippings, awards, which my parents, unknown to me, had saved. One day I went through my mother’s desk drawers. Photographs, hundreds and hundreds. Too much to bear. I’d resolved early on, while cleaning the attic and finding other old photographs, that if this was going to get done I’d be ...”

“... publishing on terrible terms, and somehow enduring it all with the ambition and stoicism of an unknown man in his twenties who had a great deal to prove. As he wrote to his brother Algernon in 1880, ‘you will see that I will force my way into the army of novelists, be my position there that of a private or of a general.’ If Gissing felt that he could ...”

“... as well, such as Davy’s recurrent hallucinations during a fever of ‘a beautiful, tender, unknown woman who nursed him, held him and had “intellectual conversations” with him’: ‘This spirit of my vision had brown hair, blue eyes and a bright rosy complexion, and was, as far as I can recollect, unlike any of the amatory forms which in early ...”

“... earliest readers missed the point and jumped to the conclusion that the essays were the work of an unknown author called Theodicaeus. Leibniz’s cover was soon blown, however, and in the coming decades the Theodicy was frequently reprinted over the name of the ‘Freiherr von Leibnitz’ (a dignity to which the author was not strictly entitled). Its fabled ...”

“... of Arctic permafrost and the warming ocean are releasing methane into the atmosphere in as yet unknown quantities. Scientists differ as to the extent and impact of these methane emissions, both now and in the futures projected by global climate models. Anisimov and Reneva, for example, calculate that by 2050, methane emissions will increase by perhaps 50 ...”