“... finds could be said to lie in phobia’s bittersweet acknowledgment of our intimacy with people unknown to us who do as we do. The key to these experiences was inadvertency. You went into a booth in search of one kind of privacy in public and ended up with another; and the experience made you think. For smell, touch and taste were not the only kinds of ...”

“... chemistry … promised a cornucopia of new stimulants and sedatives, delivered in concentrations unknown in nature, with therapeutic effects that could thus far only be guessed at.’ But Beddoes’s ambition went much further. In 1793 he published an essay in the form of a letter to Erasmus Darwin announcing, somewhat prematurely, A New Method of Treating ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... inland since the flood of the mid-14th century. Its location, near the village of Pattanam, was unknown until the early 1980s. Excavations over a site covering some fifty hectares have recovered Roman coins and jewellery, Mediterranean amphora and Yemeni pottery, as well as the teak bollards from the wharf, and the remains of an 18-foot dugout canoe. The ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... single image to hold in mind? Fox’s imagination clings to a Holbein fashion sketch, featuring an unknown woman, ‘elegant, poised and animated. It is not Jane, but it is how she really was.’ To me, Holbein’s model looks bossy, sly and smug. That’s how far the eye of imagination gets you. Jane made her debut in the historical record in 1522, when she ...”

“... Revolution and its anti-imperialist ethos was not much known. The United States, too, was an unknown player in international relations, and its record in the Philippines or Latin America – Wilson’s imposition, for instance, of military protectorates on Haiti and Nicaragua – went mostly unexamined. Boosted by a slick propaganda campaign, Wilson ...”

“... up So well but time, chance, change brings something new up, Some lesson. Your known laws become unknown; Things prized, when put to fresh proof, you disown. This is my fate. The hard life that I’ve led Till now I leave, my span of life nigh sped. And why? Because I’ve found, on fact’s own showing The best thing’s to be soft and ...”

“... territory. Men sometimes returned to the West to tell their tale, but women’s fates were largely unknown. There are exceptions, of course. Readers of the late Lesley Blanch’s lushly unreconstructed chronicle The Wilder Shores of Love will remember Aimée Dubucq de Rivery, cousin of the Empress Josephine, who in 1784 was taken by an Algerian ship in the Bay ...”

“... to achieve its national unity; it was one of these tacit, monstrous complicities not entirely unknown to history.’ The Foreign Office learned of the agreement between al-Suwaida and ‘Richard Armstrong’ of Near East Air Transport through its channels in Tel Aviv, not Baghdad. ‘Why didn’t someone come to see us instead of negotiating with Israel ...”

“... Parliamentary Party. The opposite is probably true of Michael Portillo. The other candidates are unknown and rather unknowable, though Iain Duncan-Smith, the spear-carrier of Thatcherism, is not what the Conservative Party now needs. There appears, to an outsider, little ideological coherence to the contest. Clarke, a genially tolerant figure and a strong ...”

“... 5 per cent resulted in arrests, 5 per cent are still under investigation, 25 per cent have an unknown outcome and in 65 per cent of cases the police took no further action. Harriet Wistrich, a lawyer at Birnberg Peirce, has taken on many briefs for civil actions. ‘Quite a number of companies have paid up rather than go to trial,’ she says, although ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”