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“... was one of the revelations of the first volume of Hilary Spurling’s pioneering biography: The Unknown Matisse. For more than twenty years, the Humberts were a major force in the social and political life of the Third Republic, until, in 1902, their legendary wealth was exposed as a hoax. The famous Humbert strongbox, which was supposed to contain a ...”

“... times much of the south, which was more urbanised, spoke Sumerian, a language whose affinities are unknown. From time to time the idea resurfaces that Sumerian is related to the Dravidian languages of India, although people in Turkey and Japan have sometimes convinced themselves that they, too, are part of the picture. Since much of Mesopotamian ...”

“... stunning, counter-intuitive and of no immediate practical consequence. They are therefore widely unknown outside their fraternity. A further reason for their obscurity is that the hard facts they have skilfully revealed appear to run exactly in the opposite direction to the requirements of those who write books about the mind. They have studied the sequence ...”

“... in it nothing of the Victorian moralist. In the world of this art the atmosphere of the taboo is unknown; there is none of the excited hush, the skirting round, the thrill of shocked reprobation, or any of the forms of sentimentality typical of Victorian fiction when such themes are handled.’ We may find Leavis’s circumlocution itself rather coy (‘Mrs ...”

“... immigrants on the doorstep; in areas where there are few black or brown faces, it is fear of the unknown, fed by tales from the ghettos. That fear has turned the National Front from a fringe movement at the start of the Eighties into France’s fourth strongest political grouping. There is still an understandable but mistaken tendency among his opponents and ...”

“... above all to standing where no (white) man had ever stood before, finding organisms hitherto ‘unknown to science’ or hacking his way through trackless jungle. Such a burning ambition to achieve glory, especially by testing himself physically to the limit, is not obvious from Wilson’s portrait, which is of a thin, somewhat stooped figure, blind in one ...”

“... I reread Li’s memoir and came across her description of Stefan Zweig’s novella Letter from an Unknown Woman (1922):The recipient of the letter, a famous writer and womaniser, does not recognise the sender, a woman who claims to have loved him all her life. She was his neighbour as a young girl and watched him live a busy life among women. Later, he ...”

“... O’Brien and Benedict Kiely, among others, one could give long odds against a manuscript by an unknown Irish novelist or poet seeing the light of first publication in Boston or in New York.So it’s back to London and the old Anglo-Irish alliance. As we Irish were England’s first colony, now it seems likely that we will be her last literary ...”

“... I had to wait more than a decade before my next visit, and that was only because ‘persons unknown’ had blown up the plane carrying General Zia, his crony General Akhtar Rehman, the US Ambassador and the Ambassador’s dog. I had returned on many occasions since then, but never to speak in public – until Pervez Hoodbhoy, a nuclear physicist, civil ...”

“... the Guardian: Flanders poppy no trial variant. Does my bad breath offend you? Pick a name of the unknown ypres master l as alias. Abandoned mark iv tanks, rostered by sex, Marlbrough s’en va-t-en . . . frozen mud wrestlers entertaining the Jocks. Arrest yourself: for grief of no known cause, excuse me. A superflux among bit players l which happens to be ...”

“... in Greece of the most powerful personal weapon of antiquity, which could nevertheless plausibly be unknown to stay-at-home suitors because it was so difficult to make, conserve and use that it kept being reintroduced by successive steppe migrants from very early times till the 13th century. Soldiers and Ghosts has a somewhat mawkish prologue about the warrior ...”

“... sand when she dug on the beach. Too large to unearth, its surface partly visible, but its contours unknown. She taught herself to ignore it, to walk away. And yet the hole remained her hollow point of origin, the cold crosshairs of her existence. She returned to it now. At last the sand gave way, and she was able to pry out what was buried, to raise it ...”

“... the ordinary; a newspaper advert offering for sale a hatbox of old letters generates a poem to the unknown lady who wrote them, and a Sears, Roebuck catalogue entry an ode to a dressmaker’s dummy. Something of the faux-naif hovers above his diction, as it does Bishop’s, especially in poems that work up a single conceit, such as ‘On the Death of Friends ...”

“... to them. Any future production of the play was forbidden. The Octavia, a first-century drama of unknown authorship once attributed to Seneca the younger, comes closest to providing a Roman parallel to Phrynicus’ play – a tragedy on a contemporary theme – although the similarities are tenuous. Most obviously, only a few fragments of The Capture of ...”

“... sole contribution to the sum of human wisdom – his litany of known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns – lacks a fourth permutation: unknown knowns, things we know but don’t know we know, a more suggestive notion of ideology than Brooks’s systems of extremist ideas. For a slim volume, Seduced by Story ...”