“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The frontispiece to this biographical study is an unknown photographer’s portrait of the bearded Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) taken in about 1872. He sits awkwardly hunched on a crate with his back against a sequoia, grimly frowning into the distance, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a rumpled three-piece suit. His ragged trouser hems are prominent in the foreground, along with his muddy wrinkled boots ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to chair five consecutive meetings of Cobra, the government’s crisis committee. It is almost unknown for the prime minister not to chair Cobra when he or she is in London. According to David King, the former government chief scientific adviser, Blair and Brown never failed to chair a Cobra meeting. Johnson failed five times in a row, always on the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of other people and was used to being heard. Yet in this other life my voice had been literally unknown.’ She concludes by asking us to believe that ‘as we drove down the Mall’ on the way to Buckingham Palace, she decided to write Speaking for Myself. I can’t help feeling, after reading 400-odd pages of her memoir, that I still haven’t heard her ...”

“... The aerial travelling shots associate the flying balloon with the movie camera, two machines unknown in the medieval world, as if to announce at the outset that this picture of a historical moment, as Tarkovsky said while at work on the script, is to be watched with the eyes of today. The peasant inventor who defies received ideas and takes off in his ...”

“... do with Islam. Fired up by the promises of perestroika, the students felt the parachuting in of an unknown Russian was an affront to their national pride as well as a blow to their own ambitions. The car taking Nazarbayev to work the next morning was surrounded by hundreds of young protesters. He tried to calm them, but without success. Gennady Kolbin, the new ...”

“... that the case is tried by somebody else without waiting for an objection. But it has not been unknown in modern times for a judge, typically in the chancery division, to mention to the parties that he or she holds shares in one of them and to have the objection summarily waived, as often as not with a polite expression of hope that ‘your Lordship’s ...”

“... The plunge is what the showman takes. There’s a brink and the audience – the great unknown – lies beyond it: get up there, throw in all you’ve got, court disaster if you must, but whatever you do, make something happen! Rosa, more than any painter before him, came to live for the exhibition. ‘I have risked everything to achieve ...”

“... of Guantánamo. It is entirely by accident that we have come to see what probably remains unknown to most Americans. One young American citizen, Syed Fahad Hashmi, was due to stand trial this month in Manhattan. He has been subjected to every coercive and unconstitutional practice at issue in the still outstanding extraditions in the three years since ...”