“... figure with the loose white gown girded crosswise between the breasts. That X – symbol of the unknown or of a kiss – made a target of her heart. Love’s arrow pierced deeply at first, but having evolved, at the hands of Gordon Craig and Singer, beyond the notion of a lasting love, there would be many tourists through the Parthenon that was ...”

“... to most of us. It was another example of someone who was famous in Cambridge but otherwise unknown. He was evidently Mrs Shire’s next-door neighbour. It was hardly surprising that we were ignorant and unimpressed: Leavis had retired from his university post 13 years earlier. He died, aged 82, only six months after I glimpsed him. On the cover of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... beings usually have. ‘Fast entertainment’ scared Wordsworth too: ‘A multitude of causes, unknown to former times,’ he wrote in 1800 in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind … The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking ...”

“... artists who painted ‘real Views from Nature’ in this or any other country. The (to me unknown) author of a long article on painting published in the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the 1790s wrote of the 17th-century Dutch landscape painters – he is thinking apparently of artists such as Hobbema, or Jacob van Ruisdael – that they have no rivals ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... your niche is already so circumscribed and predictable. And what can happen if you leave it is unknown, and therefore bigger.’ Heti asked for advice for those who might want to follow her example. ‘I think there are entrepreneurial opportunities everywhere, always.’ If she was starting out again, Kraus added, she’d probably buy in ...”

“... during his lifetime spread rumours that he was ‘a mere moralist’, dismissing the wit of an unknown and unnamed ‘female sceptic’ who said that ‘Dr Johnson was too great a philosopher to be a believer.’ It is Brack’s mission, one in which he succeeds and to which he brings his own tremendous learning, to rescue Hawkins from the infamy and ...”

“... away: she had barely finished middle school when she was told she would be leaving Shanghai for an unknown world and an uncertain future. But she set off in high spirits, eager to show initiative and prove she had the strength to break with her family of bourgeois intellectuals. The Down to the Countryside movement was deemed necessary because the population ...”

“... spaces and personal circles they move in. The book begins in an airplane, destination unknown, as the passengers watch the in-flight movie about revolutionary terrorists massacring a group of rich golfers and laughing: ‘We’re steeped in gruesomely humorous ambiguity,’ the narrator admits, ‘a spectacle of ridiculous people doing awful ...”

“... as much as about military possibilities. The extent of Jacobite sympathies remained the great unknown. Charles’s assurances that he had letters of support from sympathisers in England are themselves evidence of anxiety. When the rebels arrived in Manchester, a centre of Jacobitism, on 28 November there were public celebrations among avowed Jacobites and ...”

“... back from the future, eavesdropping on that captured scene, the group on the grass. While some unknown photographer presses the shutter. What is intriguing is how she uses her technique, the layering, the rubbing away, to ‘rescue’ frames that would otherwise be hurtling to oblivion. This dialogue between machine-processing and manual manipulation was ...”

“... priorities. Americans treat sins against marriage, Tocqueville wrote in 1835, ‘with a severity unknown in the rest of the world’, yet attach no stigma to ‘base cupidity’. Greed was – and is – just fine. Take the celebrated land grab of 22 April 1899. Thousands of people lined up along the Oklahoma border and at high noon, as federal agents ...”

“... inhabitants of Lazio, the region around Rome, were infected. At the time the cause of malaria was unknown, though simple observation led it to be associated with swamps, poor sewage arrangements and fetid air: hence the desire to re-route the Tiber. Pick, a cultural historian with a training in psychology, shows how this widespread sickness, with its ...”

“... order (it’s a long story) to recover the record cards of an unnamed 36-year-old woman, entirely unknown to him, who had been a student there. Exhausted and overcome by his uncharacteristic brazenness in breaking and entering, Senhor José finds refuge in the headmaster’s office to sleep for a few hours; the room – thick curtains, large and old-fashioned ...”