“... the research they were based on was published in greatly expanded form in a book by the previously unknown Fritz Tobias, entitled The Reichstag Fire: Legend and Reality. In well over seven hundred pages it presented meticulously detailed analyses of the evidence backed by an enormous quantity of careful research in support of the thesis that van der Lubbe had ...”

“... her, ‘do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied.’ In an epilogue, Lucy writes Paul’s deathbed story, worthy of a Victorian novel in its clinical detail and its poignant sentimentality. I can imagine ...”

“... the crowd of eyes; and its shame is permanent, its openness an ever possible vulnerability to some unknown consciousness which is not an entity and can never really be reached by us in any active way. Knausgaard’s achievement is to have foregrounded this immeasurably strange relationship which is there all the time but to which we so rarely attend ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... nerves. It often surprises people that there is no attested contemporary portrait. Just because an unknown hand has written ‘Anne Boleyn’ on a picture, it doesn’t mean it’s an image from the life or even an image of Anne at all. The most familiar image, in which she wears a letter ‘B’ hanging from a pearl necklace, exists in many forms and variants ...”

“... often inconclusive: it was cloth, or paper fibres bound with egg-white – or it was a substance unknown. In its most detectable form it consisted of yards of fine muslin packed within the medium’s capacious undergarments, or possibly within the medium’s capacious body cavities. It was often suggested that the muslin was regurgitated, and it was ...”

“... of Selfishness (1964) is a key text in the Objectivist canon. So is 1966’s Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Ayn Rand was born Alisa Rosenbaum in St Petersburg, in February 1905. Her father was a well-to-do pharmacist until the Bolsheviks seized control of his business in October 1917. The family fled to the Crimea, returning to Petrograd, frightened and ...”

“... Sahrawi activists told Shelley that there are still about five hundred people whose fate is unknown. The figures don’t seem especially high until one recalls how very small the adult Sahrawi population of Western Sahara is: in percentage terms, this is not so far from the levels of repression in which men like Elliott Abrams (now Deputy NSA and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and an exciting one. Cryptic posts displaying a strange design and a message in an unknown script have appeared on the internet, resisting all the efforts of the government lexicology lab (I really want there to be such a thing) to decode it. The design and the message are even reproduced on the back of the title page – the image resembles a ...”

“... Park won him the part of Michael Corleone, despite Paramount’s jitteriness about casting an unknown. The studio, which was also reluctant to cast Robert Duvall and Brando, wanted many actors more than they wanted Pacino. ‘They wanted Jack Nicholson. They wanted Robert Redford. They wanted Warren Beatty or Ryan O’Neal.’ Imagine The Godfather with ...”

“... deputy. It was his friend, Colonel John Hunt of the 60th Rifles, then stationed in Germany. Unknown to the public, and little known among British climbers, Hunt had a sound but not outstanding climbing record: to 24,500 feet on Peak 36 in Karakoram in 1935, and to 23,350 feet on Nepal Peak, on the western border of Sikkim in 1937. Hunt had not been to ...”