“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... immune system a head start compared to the inhaled virus.) Were his patients given dietary regimes unknown to others? Was their vigilant aftercare crucial, and would victims of naturally acquired smallpox have fared just as well if they had enjoyed the advantages of close medical attention? How important was it that they go out in the cold after ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that Shakespeare’s father had been buried in the churchyard, the whereabouts of the grave now unknown. So when, waiting for the service to start, I went out for a pee under one of the yews in a sheltered corner of the cemetery I may well have been pissing on Shakespeare’s dad’s grave. More decorously, Richard’s massive coffin was resting where ...”

“... official motto – ‘animus in consulendo liber’, ‘in discussion a free mind’ – is almost unknown. But since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine there has been no shortage of European politicians ready to chant ‘si vis pacem, para bellum’ – if you want peace, prepare for war. The question of whether the war in Ukraine was ‘caused’ by Nato ...”

“... Verfassungsschutz offices of their own, employing an estimated 2600 officials. Add to this the unknown number of so-called V-Leute – paid informers who spy and report on suspected anti-constitutional activities; Steinke estimates that there are around 1500 of them – and you get roughly 8400 fighters for the constitution fielded by the seventeen ...”

“... this book, rich with extraordinary narrative and acute opinion, is to enter a region mercifully unknown to Britain. This is the dark landscape of enemy occupation, a moral blackout of hidden pitfalls and lethal morasses. A Resistance fighter emerges from the sewers, only to find that his unit has been ‘turned’ and that he has been working as a ...”

“... not because they are familiar. History is produced by the oscillation between the known and the unknown: some of the very strangest things are those that seem, at first glance, to be easily recognisable.Taxation, for example, was in the 13th century a bewildering array of levies demanded by kings: dona and auxilia, tallage and scutage, purveyance and ...”

“... or the rich black intersection of St John of the Cross or the pyroclastic whisper of Anonymous, Unknown Author. Or something a little closer to home – Jeannie, for instance, the family friend whom my father (a Catholic priest in full cassock) calls simply a Eucharistic mystic, so guilelessly, and with such evident trust, that he does not even realise it ...”

“... Grand St Bernard Pass. Matthew Paris lamented that ‘the English nobility was being given away to unknown immigrants,’ and that Boniface was an illiterate bruiser as well as a foreigner, ‘more suited to warlike than to spiritual affairs’. Paris also claimed that Boniface strode into St Bartholomew’s Priory wearing armour under his vestments and threw ...”

“... right, of course, but maybe a shot of dialectical thinking, even a desperate leap into the utopian unknown (Lenin proposing a communist seizure of the postal system, Fredric Jameson imagining a communist takeover of Walmart), might help. At any rate, it couldn’t ...”