“... 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 ...”

“... from Dekker ’s Lane and walked towards Red Road. They sat down beneath the statue of the Unknown Soldier, a British Tommy. People passed by, families, children making strange noises that now denoted pleasure, now curiosity, now anger. At one point, Bishu said: ‘Mejda – babu was saying, Is there a man to do some work in the garden and help the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Cathcart Road, and well within crawling distance of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, where, unknown to him, his high-life associate, the film-maker Peter Whitehead, had been taken, after suffering a heart attack. It was one of those mornings of indulgent sunshine, filtered through gauze. Lilies and bell-shaped purple flowers. Twigs. A long pine table ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Because Matisse’s work (his late work, anyway) seldom involves any alienating display of skill or aggressive degree of difficulty, he persuades us that our ordinary visual pleasures could, were they to be extraordinarily intensified, be the same as his. He is thus vulnerable to the admirer’s revenge: to an intrusive assumption of intimacy on our part ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... yet lucidly and sometimes radiantly comic. Their watchword is what Pericles sees when his unknown daughter reaches him: ‘Patience . . . smiling extremity out of act.’ The romances inherit from history and tragedy, transforming them into comedy. One of the processes entailed is the modulation of male and heroic existence into a vision that is ...”

“... Klara – is one of thousands of abandoned Aids orphans ‘found without a name’, ‘a child of unknown parentage, abandoned no one knows by whom’. Is the mother or the rape the source of the disease? In one of Gordimer’s stories from the 1950s, ‘Which New Era Would That Be?’, a liberal young white woman visits a Johannesburg printing shop. At the ...”

“... have anything to do with the Panthéon after its arch enemy, Zola, was reburied there in 1908. The Unknown Soldier would go instead to the Arc de Triomphe, on the same day that the heart of Gambetta was reburied in the Panthéon and less than two weeks before the assassinated Socialist Prime Minister Jean Jaurès was transferred there too. Not ...”

“... rejected the ‘invitation to declare that since at the latest 1950 there has been a previously unknown tort of invasion of privacy’. The result was that it remained the case that only where by some artifice of reasoning a violation of privacy could be allocated to a relationship of confidence would the common law intervene. It was not the Human Rights ...”

“... nothing like factory work to make a soul appreciate the outdoors, even in its humblest forms. Unknown to me, the Zealous Chargehand – I forget his name, but he lives on as a type, like the Prodigal Son, or the Unfaithful Servant – had secretly cut his own copies of all the keys, including the key to the fan, so when he came along and found the fan ...”

“... earlier.To read Penman doing this in what feels like another moment of passage into something unknown and frightening is rather eerie. He himself has an eye for the media-uncanny. The autobiography flits between his itinerant childhood (his parents bought the family’s first colour TV just in time to watch the spectacle of the Black September atrocity at ...”

“... entered the race to replace him as the member for Holborn and St Pancras. He was a political unknown in a crowded field, facing past and present leaders of Camden Council as well as a popular local doctor. He drank ‘literally hundreds’ of coffees with local members and was, in his own words, ‘ruthlessly focused’ on their concerns. His speech at ...”