“... it a ‘primitive flareback’, a belief that ‘in writing her name she was permitting some unknown hostile force to obtain ascendancy over her.’) At 43 years of age, Dickinson remained in her room upstairs during her father’s funeral, her door cracked open, listening to the prayers and eulogies in the library below. Lavinia denied there was ...”

“... a substantial number of people. He unearthed a huge mass of material, much of it previously unknown, and on particular issues, such as the question of Krupp’s attitude to Hitler in 1932-33, before the Nazis seized power, he stuck to the documentary record and did not make claims that went beyond it. Manchester was not an economic historian, and he was ...”

“... Fitzgerald in effect has blessed this effort. In the last year or two of his life, for reasons unknown, he scribbled a rough outline of The Great Gatsby in the back of a copy of André Malraux’s novel Man’s Hope – nine entries for the nine chapters of the book, which Churchwell adopts for the same purpose. ‘I, Glamour of Rumsies and Hitchcoks’ is ...”

“... utter unknowability to the poet and to the mother alike – ‘Part of herself, yet to herself unknown’: the light pathos of her ignorance is darkened by our awareness that to Barbauld the expectant mother’s experience is no less inscrutable. Sometimes, to great effect, it is the poems themselves that don’t seem to work out as planned. The joky poem ...”

“... decades of the 19th century? Should the mingling of canonical names with figures now largely unknown (Hugh Benson? J.W. Mackail? A.E.W. Mason?) surprise us? That Writers, Readers and Reputations does not even ask, still less answer, these or comparable questions is part of what makes it a puzzling production. It is not easy to say what this book is ...”

“... about a forthcoming al-Qaida attack – when Woodward’s State of Denial made this previously unknown meeting news it was considered a significant development – although the omission is not so much surprising as expected, and what’s more revealing about the 9/11 Commission Report is what it hid.‘Americans have a technique for concealing by ...”

“... camp, where work is carried out in three sectors – the Known Knowns, the Known Unknowns and the Unknown Unknowns – that are named after everybody’s favourite Rumsfeldism. In ‘The Age of Horrorism’ Amis insists that, when thinking of Islamism, ‘our’ ideology – he calls it ‘Westernism’ – ‘weakens us in two ways. It weakens our powers of ...”

“... that he inspired bin Laden; it is known that he aroused the jealousy of Zawahiri. What remains unknown to this day is who was responsible for his assassination in Peshawar in 1989. The murder of Azzam – who, with bin Laden’s financial support, turned the international effort to defeat the Soviet invaders in Afghanistan into a pan-Islamic jihad ...”

“... with everyone else at the arboreal plenty of America but, as a German, has experience of something unknown in the New World: forest management. He feels more affinity with the indigenous people than the incomers, not least in their attitude to time: In Europe people consider the past and the future with greater seriousness. We have been managing forests for ...”

“... but several Trotskyist parties, including the Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire – numbers unknown but a driving force in Nanterre – plus at least two extreme-sports parties of the Maoist persuasion. What was astonishing was the way the student protest found an echo in the factories. Days after the students abandoned the lecture theatres, workers ...”

“... Then the novel won the Prix Goncourt. By now the rumours were proliferating. Some said the unknown author was a Lebanese terrorist, others that he was this or that famous writer, and Gary claimed to have met a young woman who told him she had had a liaison with Ajar, who was, she said, ‘a terrific fucker’. Gary recruited a distant cousin called ...”

“... cycles of the moon, but counting months and years has no meaning for them. Birthdays and age are unknown concepts. Life for them unfolds mainly in the present; only in the present can their daily needs be fulfilled.’ By the time he found them, all but a few hundred of the former nomads were living in permanent settlements, in longhouses connected by track ...”

“... manual of killing methods in his father’s attic – and with it, as Branche puts it, ‘an unknown father’. Only when his father was dying did Feiertag learn that his middle name, Bernard, belonged to his father’s best friend – a soldier killed as a result of a ‘regrettable error’, never spelled out. As the child of another veteran ...”

“... reluctantly to marry, was the most ‘depressed’ of them all. Why, as Roger Poole asks in The Unknown Virginia Woolf, didn’t he get straight back on the boat to Ceylon after receiving the letter in which she just about accepted his proposal? In her review of Quentin Bell’s 1972 biography, ‘Mrs Virginia Woolf – a Madwoman and Her Nurse’, Cynthia ...”

“... other fluids not visible to the naked eye. ‘In one motel, the purple beam had picked up so much unknown DNA off the pillowcases, blankets and sheets that the bed turned psychedelic.’Meanwhile, the undertaker Royal Davis encourages his reluctant school-age son to hand out business cards at scenes of trauma. Royal is a ‘freelance mortician’, two words ...”