“... bits of it within reach. For a while I think I have grown a new line on one of my hands, a line unknown to palmistry. I think perhaps I have a new fate. But it proves to be a medical artefact, a puckering of the skin produced by one of the tubes sewn into my wrist. We call those ‘lines’, too. The iambic pentameter of the saline stand, the alexandrine of ...”

“... dropout selling cheap records from his store in Oxford Street, before he signed up the unknown Mike Oldfield and built a record label on the astonishing success of Oldfield’s first album, Tubular Bells. In his own mind he is a creative free spirit, and that seems to be how much of the British press and public sees him too. But in reality, he and ...”

“... ignored them. Exactly what he was writing and why he had gone to ground, keeping silent, are both unknown. He told Carmichael the letters were probably from tradesmen hoping to get payment on a bill, but it is clear that his family and Cora Taylor in England were both desperate for word, and that Crane knew it. His silence was deliberate, prompted by ...”

“... the week before. ‘I have noticed,’ it says, ‘that so many people like him are all alone and unknown, yet when they spill a little blood, the whole world knows who they are. A man who was known by no one is now known by everyone. His face splashed across every screen, his name across the lips of every person on the planet, all in the course of one ...”

“... Cambridge: drinking wine, eating Gruyère alone in a café, he feels ‘ready for anything’. Unknown to him, however, and wholly unsuspected, a scream is slowly but steadily approaching: It resembles a white mask with spread fingers That will grab and drub and wring his heart Like a bandage impossible to clean. A scream Resembling a nuclear melt-down ...”

“... the rulebook in this new political reality: Bannon’s views on inflationary risk are as yet unknown, but it’s unlikely to keep him awake at night. In the present climate, any central banker who threatened to stand in the way of such schemes, as Greenspan did to Clinton in 1993, might not be in a job for very ...”

“... only occasion when a Christ figure might be manifesting himself in one of these pieces, he is an unknown old man with ‘long, grey, undistinguished hair’ attending a wedding. Asked if he was invited, he replies: ‘I’m not here to nibble on your fucking salmon.’ Though the pieces are extremely short they aren’t necessarily compressed, if compression ...”

“... in the National Portrait Gallery offers a grey-white face, long, guarded, medieval, remote: ‘unknown woman, formerly known as Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury’. It is painted on a dateable oak panel, and the dates suit the presumed subject, but the artist is anonymous. Where is Hans Holbein when you need him? The sitter might as well be carved, for ...”

“... there were only three ‘confidential’ (the lowest level of ‘classified’) emails. One is unknown. One informed her that Kofi Annan was stepping down as special envoy attempting to mediate the war in Syria, and the third was about Clinton’s forthcoming telephone call to Joyce Banda, the newly inaugurated president of Malawi. Lock her up! (It was ...”

“... like scribal errors, others like deliberate revisions – made by whom? The copyist? Donne? An unknown intermediary? Sometimes it’s possible to make a good guess; sometimes it isn’t. Textual scholarship has sorted the manuscripts into genealogically related groups, and identified certain manuscripts of greater authority than others, but none of these ...”

“... where previous observers had perceived a barren wilderness.’ He found numerous hitherto unknown works and little-known artists, and was able to do this by virtue of ‘a breadth of experience which he alone possessed, after many years of scrutinising pictures in private collections and the sale rooms, and of collecting information from ...”

“... early poem, Miss Maniac confesses that, having been exiled from her home, she became ‘lost in unknown agony’ and ‘laughed as if in mirth’. Everywhere in Lear you sense a connection between damage and merriment, a taste for the comic as a kind of frantic fun. When he describes the Old Person of Chili ‘whose conduct was painful and silly’, the ...”

“... reason – to pass passionately along the wire, so becoming for a moment the very nerve of some unknown other room, place or country. It’s been instructive to reread her fiction at a time of renewed attention to the Internet Novel as a distinct subgenre. Bowen certainly imagined the telephone as a social medium. In To the North, Cecilia, returning from a ...”

“... and girls were ‘SPECIALLY WARNED not to accept offers of help from men and women who [were] UNKNOWN to them, or to go to any situation they [had] obtained through ADVERTISEMENTS without first assuring themselves of their RESPECTABILITY’. What’s striking is how modern the sentiment sounds. Last month, following Wayne Couzens’s conviction for the ...”

“... sbrodeghezzi (‘dribbles’), e potacci (‘messes’) – originating in Triestine dialect and unknown to most Italians. Though Jenny McPhee’s new version of the book is always sprightly and readable, the English version inevitably loses the fun of these and many other odd words and expressions that turn up in the ‘family lexicon’. Ginzburg goes on ...”