“... with a ‘crackly laugh’ and an unquenchable dialect habit. Such figures were by no means unknown in the fiction of the period. In Middlemarch, the hapless Mr Brooke’s attempt to canvass a tenant farmer called Mr Dagley is met with a violent political diatribe in a dialect so impenetrable that he has to make his excuses and leave. George Eliot waxes ...”

“... in the accounts which are daily published of the approach of a strange and apparently somewhat unknown disease – which the newspapers are calling influenza.’ It’s now conjectured that this ‘influenza’ may have been a coronavirus, with waves across the next two years and a pattern of neurological disturbances on the back of respiratory ...”

“... his own fate as mixed: ‘My Cid shrugged and shook his head.’The exact date and place are unknown, but Rodrigo Díaz was probably born in the mid-to-late 1040s, to an aristocratic Castilian family in the village of Vivar, near Burgos. There are no representations from the time of what he looked like. In the sources he goes by multiple names ...”

“... of the Fascist tradition loyal to the Republic of Salò. But as major political actors, they were unknown quantities and could project an aura of novelty more easily. As for Bossi, he was the great, genuine interloper of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Berlusconi’s feat in putting these disparate forces together, virtually overnight, was ...”

“... came to India’ – ancestrally, indeed, ‘fired … with an idea of nationality in a manner unknown in other parts of the world. We Indians are one as no two Englishmen are.’ Nehru’s claim of an ‘impress of oneness’, going back six thousand years, persisted from the prewar writings collected in The Unity of India to his final dispute with ...”

“... to an elaborate set of makeshift interpretations whose truth values range from the historically unknown to the ethnographically unwarranted, passing by way of the textually unproven.’ That’s a fair sample of Sahlins’s icy anger. It opts out of Obeyesekere’s more global claim – truly marred by some bad Hawaiian ethnography that I’ve omitted ...”

“... young men and women self-evident. Stalin’s terror and the Gulag were still far in the future, or unknown in the West. If Sorge had a trade at all, it was, like Philby’s, journalism; the subject that really interested him was politics. In November 1918, he did his best to bring on Germany’s defeat by lecturing to mutinous sailors of the High Seas Fleet in ...”

“... problem. He kept breaking the crockery and asking Amfisa Nikolaevna, Uncle Kostia’s wife, for unknown or unobtainable ingredients without which, he claimed, he would not be able to prepare a single ‘decent’ dish worthy of a ‘governor’. From early morning Amfisa Nikolaevna bustled about in her pink flannel dressinggown, squawking like a hysterical ...”

“... and Robert Garioch, Roy Fuller, Hamish Henderson and Sorley Maclean – and many others wholly unknown to fame. It’s true that sensitive annotation of individual experience was the hallmark of their generation of writers. Owen and Rosenberg had, in a sense, already ‘said it all’ about modern mechanized warfare, and grandiose political statement in ...”

“... just as that individual was about to enjoy new liberties. I doubt if a book on Beatrice Webb by an unknown biographer would have secured an advance on royalties of much more than a fiver in 1961. A few months before I presented my cheque for 50 pounds to my bank, the first volume of Leonard Woolf’s autobiography, Sowing, was published. It covered his own ...”

“... of bassinet of life for him, dim with lace’. Of a husband secretly wishing he had married some unknown other woman: ‘His regrets opened out fanwise, profound avenues, each white at the end with a faceless statue.’ Of after-dark London: a ‘provincial meanness’ is exposed by the bright lights ‘like a governess gone to the bad, in a Woolworth ...”

“... pushing of the stilus. Whether she was as thrilled by his poems as he was by her cushions is unknown. The friendship between Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna brooks no romanticising but its balance of forces is familiar enough. Their mutual appreciation was a trade-off, in which the obsessed artist got a taste of grace and the lady fraternised with ...”

“... there would have been no call for the 1958 tests since the Ulam-Teller concept would have remained unknown to Aldermaston. This could conceivably have led to an earlier signing of the 1963 treaty banning atmospheric nuclear tests. Without a radiation implosion design to show the Americans in 1957, the McMahon Act would still have been amended but US weapon ...”

“... that emerged during the preceding century. Other forms – national shrines at the graves of ‘unknown soldiers/warriors’, for example, or war cemeteries – were more or less invented during the Great War out of the atoms of a shared past. Generally, the 19th century was not kind to tradition and the men and women who mourned and remembered in 1914 and ...”

“... through space time, and, relational here as always, stresses family links: ‘I search for a lost, unknown song/in a street as long as a night,/stamped with my own surname.’ Later in the poem, her poor old man will be called a ‘broken sign of the unbroken continuum’. Yet if her father provides a link to the ‘native, Irish speaking’ McGuckians, that ...”