“... the last book of Paradise Lost, the Archangel Michael describes how ‘a jangling noise of words unknown’ replaces the ‘native language’ of the denizens of the now fallen world. As Alistair Fowler’s notes in the magnificent – if underhistoricised – Longman edition show, the phrase ‘jangling noise’ is taken from Sylvester’s 1613 translation ...”

“... sister of Sir Edward Stafford, who later became English Ambassador in France. Here is a hitherto unknown dimension to Thomas Drury: he is a brother-in-law of that most conspiratorial of ambassadors, whose house in Paris was a conduit of spies, agents and conspirators. He is also a brother-in-law of William Stafford, the protagonist of the Stafford Plot of ...”

“... ever inquiring into who she was or what it meant to be in her position. She is venerated but unknown, like all idealised objects, including homelands. In the last of their encounters, she asks Yunis for $3000 so that one of their sons can open a garage in Haifa. Though he’s risen through the ranks of Fatah, Yunis hasn’t that kind of money. As her ...”

“... of an age of faith. When we think of young adults in the West, driven by secular demons of unknown provenance to starve and purge themselves, and to pierce and slash their flesh, we wonder uneasily if she is our sister under the skin. Gemma is far less famous than her contemporary Thérèse of Lisieux, whose remains a short while ago went on a ...”

“... them up. To a conscientious Muslim, this is the perfect storm, in which opaque liabilities, the unknown nature of the underlying debt, fair-weather forecasts by ratings agencies, plus risk transfer and riba, conspire to wreck large parts of the fleet. Is there anyone clinging to the flotsam, post-9/15, who disagrees?Non-Muslims will recognise the process of ...”

“... sense of my own identity as a person free to roam the city, in narrative negotiation, because my unknown friend elects to sit, to define his place. To witness and wait. I am comforted by his persistence, staying resolutely in his slump while hospitals and churches fall. But I am also aware, of course, that he’s one of the damaged of the city. He is not ...”

“... the Act of Union, ‘from which … the united fortunes of Great Britain flow on to their unknown destiny’. Japan is ‘the meeting of the waters’ of East and West and multicultural England is described by Jusserand as the ‘meeting of the waters’, Norman, Saxon and Dane coming together so that ‘England is now “merrie England”, bursting ...”

“... Ford, answering all questions, readily admits what she cannot remember. One previously unknown bit of information that Ford reveals is that she first contacted her congresswoman with her story when she saw Kavanaugh’s name on the shortlist of potential nominees. She felt it was her ‘civic duty’ to alert the authorities that there were serious ...”

“... by prices in a free market they would be groping in the dark, and stumbling towards miseries unknown since the middle ages. Some socialists might relish the prospect, persuading themselves that wealth corrupts and poverty breeds virtue; but if they meant what they said about constructing a ‘rational economic system’ they would have to swallow their ...”

“... true. I wasn’t impressed exactly, but I did feel messed with, as if he had developed a persona unknown to me. Fame is a strange thing, a creepy thing, but glittery, with an aura. I didn’t want it for myself, but rubbing up against it appealed to me in a way I didn’t trust. I went to the last reading on the Infinite Jest book tour in Champaign with my ...”

“... Israel, the US and local Arab regimes is now threatened by popular forces of uncertain magnitude, unknown direction, unclear vision. Whatever shape they eventually take, theirs will be an unofficial culture of the dispossessed, the silenced and the scorned. Very likely, too, it will bear in itself the distortions of years of past official policy.Meanwhile, it ...”

“... been bullied, physically or verbally? Yes, though the extent of anti-Jewish harassment remains unknown and contested. There is also the question, as Shaul Magid writes in The Necessity of Exile, of whether ‘the single umbrella of antisemitism’ best describes all these incidents. ‘What is antisemitism if it is no longer accompanied by ...”

“... the great second phase of writing, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion. There is still a good deal unknown about the biography of Jane Austen and the dating of the earlier novels, which went through a number of rewritings. But clearly a pause of ten, even fifteen years divided the two phases. It was possibly marked by the sense of different kinds of ...”

“... young love, but the single-minded purpose of the film is to show her as a woman who, for reasons unknown, is pathologically incapable of human empathy, and the cohabitation within the same fictive space of Mahler’s intensely expressive music and the portrayal of a disordered mind ensures the inevitable elision of the one with the other.Tár rations its ...”

“... Russia to America in 1981, and now takes him back and forth between those countries (a liberty unknown to émigrés like Nabokov or Sergei Dovlatov).Recall Lukács’s phrase ‘transcendental homelessness’. What I have been describing, both in my own life and in the lives of others, is more like secular homelessness. It cannot claim the theological ...”