“... are ‘known unknowns’; the UK is unwilling to retire its nuclear weapon stockpile because of ‘unknown unknowns’. If it is to keep its nuclear weapons as an insurance policy against unknown threats in the future, then co-operation with France seems to be the least worst option. As things stand, both parties in the ...”

“... he was not much involved) is Don Carlos, which is now routinely heard with whole swathes of music unknown to most of the 20th century. Elsewhere, Verdi’s desire to control the details of his musical text means that there are fewer surprises, but even a work as well known as Rigoletto can boast fresh configurations in its new, critical edition. For a century ...”

“... violating vividness in which even a fork is ‘lurid with egg yolk’. In effect, the unknown continent is the Will Self prose style embodied as a landmass. Recherché vocabulary, baroque metaphor and bold cartoonist’s strokes combine with no-nonsense efficiency of narration, as befits a literary road movie. The Butt’s quasi-Aussie argot ...”

“... are interdependent, saming is more characteristic of the medieval encounter with the unfamiliar or unknown. Its face is the more friendly and generous of the two, especially in the admirably benign Chaucer; but this is not to say that it is less telling, or less oppressive, in its final effects. One of the great ‘samers’ of the later Middle Ages was the ...”

“... of known quantities, but the novel asks for something else, something native and essential but unknown. Many fiction-writers, despite what they say, betray a little romance about the question of belonging, as they surely must, otherwise, like the opinion-writer, they will merely know the price of everything and the value of nothing. There may also be, in ...”

“... in the public culture of Europe in the early 21st century. Yet the name of Auguste Comte is unknown to countless people whose daily lives and mental outlook are widely shaped or impinged on by his principles. It was not always thus. Much recent research on the history of social reform and ‘planning’ movements in Britain and Europe before, during and ...”

“... An unknown number of years ago a rockfall closed the entrance to a cave in the limestone gorge of the Ardèche river in France. In 1994 three speleologists found air wafting from an opening, cleared a way in and discovered caves and grottos running 400 metres or so into the rock. The walls are lined with drawings of animal species – bison, lions, bears, horses, aurochs, deer and rhinoceroses ...”

“... resumes, and your mind is again in your hard grip on the chains which had been until then as if unknown to your body during what might have been the interglacial lull, or the period during which the original ooze grew single-cell organisms, which grew small claws and feet and then had to have eyes, till your hands become again hard, heavy, and all the ...”

“... wrong word order). It was, the exhibition catalogue suggests, ‘written at speed to meet some unknown deadline’.* The script, on the other hand, is masterly: fluent, rhythmical and regular. The swift, even script of the History has a modern urgency. It is exhibited beside a Pontifical – a book listing the ceremonies only a bishop can perform – that ...”

“... who underwrote John Hawkins’s second slaving-voyage along the coasts of Africa in 1564 is by an unknown artist ...”

“... Steller discovered Rhytina stelleri (now also called Hydromalis gigas), a huge sea-going mammal unknown to the learned world and indeed to mankind in general. Georg Wilhelm Steller was one of those many Germans who came to Russia from the time of Peter the Great onwards to help modernise the empire and explore its resources. He had studied theology, botany ...”

“... pick up the latest information on the natural sciences before undertaking his exploration of the unknown territory, and although the expedition was to be equipped with recently-invented equipment, including a new kind of airgun and packets of friction matches, developed expressly for this occasion, Lewis’s education in landscape description was to be less ...”

“... have added another myth to those already wrapped round Orwell. In their previous book, The Unknown Orwell, and again in Orwell: The Transformation, they postulate two characters who inhabit in sequence the same body: first Eric Blair (Orwell’s real name), and then, by a process of enlightenment and political commitment, George Orwell. This separation ...”

“... which he tells us something about suicide, and something about death, and something about all the unknown and unknowable future experiences that death represents. And he does this by telling us something about conscience. Or rather, two things about conscience. The first quarto of Hamlet has, ‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,’ while the second ...”

“... messages in bottles tossed into the ‘flood of barbarism bursting on Europe’ for the benefit of unknown future readers. The floodwaters have now mercifully receded, and the bottles sporadically wash up on foreign shores, thanks to intrepid translators taking on the challenge of Adorno’s idiosyncratic prose. The first to make him accessible to an ...”