“... that was expected of me, I conjured up the book I myself would have liked to read, the sort by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic.’ The fabular motif – ‘conjured’ – and stress on both pleasure and productive distance are typical. Each story concerns an individual in a state of unnatural division or ...”

“... of a massive killing of innocent people by a bureaucracy acting in accordance with beliefs which, unknown or rejected in earlier centuries, had come to be taken for granted, as self-evident truths’. Of course popular beliefs had to fall into line with the bureaucracy’s position, and Cohn provides plenty of examples to show that they did: rural and ...”

“... what those early explorers who left us their accounts of coming into contact with previously unknown cultures, or their fictional counterparts like Swift’s Gulliver, would make of today’s Americans. Delegated by God to be the masters of the universe, convinced of their moral superiority, they find it easy to slaughter both the guilty and the innocent ...”

“... a widening and widening optic, that returns us unexpectedly (‘the variable/when the outcome is unknown,/as always the outcome is unknown’ – take that, Mr Rumsfeld) to the place we began. It may be to comic or grievous effect. It is an adventitious gallivanting movement across country that makes denser, bunched sense ...”

“... Obama; minor military interventions in French Africa, in tribute to Franco-German friendship; an unknown number of special ops forces doing active duty in unknown places, together with colleagues from Denmark, Norway, Sweden and elsewhere, but always under US direction. Add the (generous) provision of airbases for the use ...”

“... their black suits blending into one and their button-black eyes popping in parallel towards some unknown object (a joint-television gaze from pre-television times) makes us wish she had portrayed the opposite sex more. She does mothers and babies with an acute eye for the weight and fall of an infant’s flesh, and an acute sense of the weight and fall of an ...”

“... Randolph Henry Ash in a copy of one of Ash’s books in the London Library. The letters address an unknown lady; they are suggestive of intellectual, and perhaps other kinds of passion; and Roland, from motives obscure to himself but none the less compelling, steals them. He does not tell Blackadder; he does not tell Val, the woman with whom he damply and ...”

“... England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line in 1763 still remains largely unknown, as does the way she endured the social and intellectual obscurity that lasted from her controversial second marriage in 1778 to her death in a small Berkshire village in 1791. She had been born some sixty years before, the granddaughter of a banker and ...”

“... am obliged to accept these three books in great part as documentary reports, as information about unknown ways of life. But perhaps this is right. One of the many problems for an African writer in the English language is the question of his audience. Who is he writing for? For his own people – for the small fraction of his own people who will ever be able ...”

“... most peculiar man. At a guess, he may have had to a preternatural degree that quality of mind, not unknown among modern scholars, that causes a man to believe that whatever he thinks, says or does is infallibly true and right, and that whatever he observes in the world is true and right only insofar as it coincides with what is already in his mind. It would be ...”

“... In the opening chapter of A Study in Scarlet Dr Watson is introduced to Sherlock Holmes. Holmes says, ‘How are you?’ and adds: ‘You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.’ Watson asks in astonishment: ‘How on earth did you know that?’ and Holmes, ‘chuckling to himself’, answers: ‘Never mind.’ In the following chapter the two men observe through a window ‘a stalwart, plainly dressed individual’ walking down the street with a letter in his hand ...”

“... remarks. He challenges you to prove relevance and competence. He wanted to be ‘illustrious and unknown’, and wrong-foots biographers by making their curiosity seem prurient or irrelevant. He thought most writing about art ignorant and unnecessary: ‘I have spoken to the most intelligent people about art,’ he said to George Moore, ‘and they have not ...”

“... to Elzbieta Ettinger, lurked within the ‘famous revolutionary’. Drawing on previously unknown private letters, this book portrays Luxemburg as a socially insecure and emotionally vulnerable woman. The question left unresolved is how a person so frail and fallible could have become one of the most charismatic figures in the history of revolutionary ...”

“... like the GDP figures which are responsible for that. We’re deep in the land of Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns. (Why, incidentally, was he so widely mocked for talking about the difference between known and unknown unknowns? It seems to me an immensely useful distinction, not least as a way of describing the difference ...”

“... to show us the way. ‘Such is the service that these kind genies perform for us, they show us the unknown strengths of our soul, which we increase by using them.’ But then there is another fairy, almost too Proustian to be true. She explains that her gifts are very different from the ones her sisters have offered, because she is ‘the fairy of ...”