“... Bundock says, ‘a young child struggling to come to terms with a new identity, a new home, and an unknown future’. Yet that uncertainty was in a sense what the young Francis embraced, for in 1755 his status changed after the death of Colonel Bathurst, whose will included the bequest, ‘I give to Francis Barber a negroe whom I brought from Jamaica aforesaid ...”

“... not hide it,’ Gustave’s friend Maxime Du Camp wrote. ‘He was bewildered, as if faced with an unknown pathological case.’ Pathological is what the situation soon became. Driving a coach with his brother in January 1844, Flaubert ‘fell, as if struck with apoplexy … and for ten minutes [Achille] thought I was dead.’ It was the first of many nervous ...”

“... much simpler. In 1926, Fowler listed the various ways to end a proper letter: Yours faithfully: To unknown person on business. Yours truly: To slight acquaintance. Yours very truly: Ceremonious but cordial. Yours sincerely: In invitations & friendly but not intimate letters. But that didn’t solve every dilemma. In an age of ritualised courtship and ...”

“... particulate matter the internet said we really needed to keep out of their lungs. Prepping for the unknown, we ordered a dozen more masks from China on Amazon. The boys’ first summer camp was in a nature area five minutes from our house. They were meant to spend the whole week outside. Instead they spent it in the cramped quarters of the ...”

“... hartals went off quite peacefully, not least the first one in Amritsar itself, but the Punjab was unknown territory to Gandhi and O’Dwyer managed to keep him out of the province. He first hoped to have him deported to Burma, as the ex-emperor of Delhi had been after 1857, but only managed to have him detained in Bombay. O’Dwyer then went on to arrest and ...”

“... War the Marshall Plan did the opposite. Steil’s hero on the domestic front is another relatively unknown figure, Arthur Vandenberg, Republican senator for Michigan. Vandenberg understood that in order to get Congress to agree funding, and the US public to countenance troops remaining in Europe, another red scare would be needed. Vandenberg advised Truman to ...”

“... hollows of         ocean, that none but a god might see, Rose out of the silence of things unknown of                 a presence, a form, a might, And we heard as a prophet that hears God’s             message against him, and may not flee.Swinburne’s grandest theme of all, the indomitable spirit of man unable to escape ...”

“... Mack Sennett, screwball comedies and American actresses, who embodied ‘a kind of sex appeal unknown in Europe’. He had been in the US for barely a year before writing: ‘It is no longer a European observer who is making these observations.’ But it wasn’t really so. Kracauer was able to discern the Germanic essence of postwar American film ...”

“... sheet.More than half the contents of the new edition were first published in 1952 by Julliard. For unknown reasons, Serge’s widow, Laurette Séjourné, insisted that no unpublished material existed. I asked Richard Greeman, his principal translator and founder of the Victor Serge Foundation, what the story was. Séjourné, he explained,had them in her ...”

“... when the Tories have the upper hand at the Admiralty, blights his career, and Tobias Barrow in The Unknown Shore (1959), a dry run for Maturin, is adopted as a child by a Whig landowner who plans to bring him up to be a marvel of omniscience but instead confines him to a ‘strange, dark, unsocial house, with odd, unsatisfactory servants perpetually coming and ...”

“... truth, our shared sentence: ‘I shall be dead.’ The poet A.E. Stallings faces up to the unknown in a more tender voice in ‘Another Bedtime Story’: The tales that start with once and end with ever after, All, all of the stories are about going to bed, About coming to terms with the night, alleviating the dread Of laying the body down, of lying ...”

“... war, by publishing her in Les Temps modernes and writing a preface for her novel Portrait of a Man Unknown (1948). (The war between antediluvian existentialists and cool modernists had not yet started.) Without the advent of the ‘new novel’ in the 1950s, Sarraute’s career might not have taken off at all. But it did take off, and towards the end of the ...”

“... enablers had orchestrated. Of the two scientists King chose for the testing, one was wholly unknown in the field of archaeometry and turned out to have been an usher at her wedding. The other, approached by Bagnall, ‘hadn’t the foggiest’ (as he subsequently admitted) when it came to ancient ink identification, but was Bagnall’s brother-in-law ...”

“... to destroy parts of every Ukrainian city they have reached. The number of Ukrainian casualties is unknown, but around five million people are internally displaced or are now refugees.I crossed into Ukraine overland by taking a bus that had dropped off refugees in Krakow and was heading back to pick up more. There were few passengers, almost all of them ...”

“... yet. ‘Don’t put this in your novel!’ her mother cries whenever she does something of which unknown future readers might disapprove, like unbuckling her seatbelt while driving.Selin’s naive faith in writing as her vocation seems to be part of her idiocy, but is it? After all, we are reading the novel that results from that faith. Nonetheless, she has ...”