“... Scotland. In November 1940 two Parisian boys placed a floral Cross of Lorraine at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Such small gestures mitigated the alienating effects of tyranny and encouraged active resistance in some and perhaps a tolerance of reprisals as a consequence of that resistance in others – although, as the reaction to the via Rasella attack ...”

“... of the Balcombe Street defendants. Their detailed confessions provided a wealth of hitherto unknown detail that exactly matched police forensic information and could only have been known to those who carried out the Guildford and Woolwich offences. Despite their admissions, no attempt was made by the police to interview the Balcombe Street defendants ...”

“... oil and petrol. There are also three more ‘numbers’ on the ration coupons, representing unknown items whose rationing has yet to be announced. Some items aren’t rationed for the simple reason that they’re unavailable: sausages aren’t on coupons, but then they can’t be found anyway. There hasn’t been alcohol in the shops for over a ...”

“... and manufactured by designers with PhDs in botany and chemistry. The acronyms HIV and AIDS were unknown and the only initials to cause anxiety were DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration). The growing voices of America’s neo-conservative movement would later argue that their interpretation of the American Dream, long deferred because of people like Hunter ...”

“... of Aids may relapse into folk wisdom, a fatalistic attitude to a disaster whose causes are unknown. Examples of this are not hard to find in Africa; I attended the opening of a health centre a year or so ago in West Nile Province in the North of Uganda. The four-wheel drive vehicle bearing the District Medical Officer arrived with the slogans of the ...”

“... a mountaineer conquering his own nightmare, he embarked on a two-month personal encounter with the unknown – the working class, who populated his childhood memories as a spectre of fear and loathing. He made a sentimental journey ... amidst the supposedly silent majority, the people excluded from politics who appeared as vagrants on the doorstep of ...”

“... life and reality. In the face of accumulating renown he has gone to ever greater lengths to remain unknown and unknowable, unclassifiable as a person. His whereabouts at any given time are revealed only to a very few associates; he has granted no interviews and revealed nothing about his personal life, though he hints in the Introduction that he has by now had ...”

“... the double act has achieved self-conscious public stardom by way of an indispensable but virtually unknown ghostwriter (Quixote and Sancho, we realise, have never heard of Cide Hamete Benengeli until Cervantes presents his work to them). Quixote was always aware, of course, that knights errant had magical biographers – how else could he have become ...”

“... Peter Taylor, to an excellent American fiction of the present time which seems to be virtually unknown in Britain, where feelings of respectful inferiority are commonly produced by other varieties of American writing: this is a fiction which tends to be regional and reclusive in character, and to prefer stories to novels. His opening story tells of a ...”

“... the twins had a background that Hergé never spoke of. They’d been born out of wedlock, father unknown, and treated kindly, six years later, by a countess who hired their mother as a chambermaid at a grand estate outside Brussels. As a result, a family legend seems to have given Hergé’s grandfather aristocratic, possibly royal status. All this is of ...”

“... produced’. Velikovsky appeared in American culture pretty much as a man from Mars: he was almost unknown to the intellectual communities whose expertise his book most directly engaged. Born in Vitebsk (now in Belarus) in 1895 to well-off Jewish parents, Velikovsky studied a wide range of subjects at Montpellier and Edinburgh before taking his medical degree ...”

“... Sonnets were addressed not to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, but to a hitherto unknown young man. His name was Alastair Fowler. The name ‘Alastare’ (or ‘Alaster’, the more usual 16th-century form) is written in black and white in the first two lines of the most famous poem in the sequence: ShALl I compare thee to A Summers ...”

“... guns but the increasing number of accidents. How much time Kathleen Raine spent at Sandaig is also unknown, because she threw her diaries into a river, and when he came to write his book, Maxwell excised her, though ‘ring of bright water’ was her line – the most famous one she ever wrote. Her poem, without a title or her name, appears as the book’s ...”

“... involves being both incredibly, outlandishly famous by serious-writer standards while also being unknown to the general reader, is the fact that Stephenson works in the area of SF and fantasy writing. For reasons I’ve never seen explained or even thoroughly engaged with, there seems to be an unbridgeable crevasse between the SF/fantasy audience and the ...”

“... of these books and pamphlets being trusted to the postal service, as gifts to peers, known and unknown. News had a frontier quality, coming in on the railway (in my case the clapped-out North London Line between Dalston Junction and Camden Road, for the great souk of Compendium Books). Control of production kept the process well away from corporate ...”