“... natural world were ‘more poets than observers’. Finally, however, he was pushed too far. Two unknown naturalists (so unknown that generations of historians have been unable to determine the first name of one of them) conjectured a link between molluscs and vertebrates. If, they argued, a vertebrate is bent backwards ...”

“... a family trait. I can almost hear his outrage at the unfairness surrounding him. It has not been unknown for later O’Hagans to feel misunderstood as they make a bid for glory. Yet a thief’s status only improves with age. Michael’s brother James was a dab hand at stealing from Glasgow warehouses, and people admired him for it well into an old age that ...”

“... at important intersections and on bridges; they roar through the streets in new four-by-fours. And unknown numbers of plainclothes policemen monitor the lives of almost everyone who lives in Egypt, foreigners in particular. In the last year or so local and international human rights groups have reported the unexplained disappearances of more than four hundred ...”

“... the field, with expeditions to collect samples of dangerous pathogens. In search of bats that host unknown coronaviruses, virus hunters clamber into unmapped caves, risking snakebite, lesions from razor-edged rocks and rockfalls, as well as infection from the bite or scratch of a bat, or from the bat shit that coats every surface. Macho camaraderie encourages ...”

“... with a reduced right to family reunion and no welfare benefits, and the prospect of removal to an unknown destination after that. The higher courts have ruled that the statement in the Refugee Convention that, to avoid penalties for unauthorised entry, a refugee must come ‘directly’ from their country of origin should not be taken literally – but this ...”

“... at the camera; Ornette Coleman looks mean and impressive. But there are also the photos of the unknown and unnamed: a garment worker tugging a covered cart, three men pushing heavy hand trucks on a busy street. The value of a retrospective is that these pictures can sit beside, say, a shot of the bassist Reggie Workman playing, his hands in motion, his ...”

“... if we were acquainted with them and approved the choice! How flat and disappointing should they be unknown to us! A moment later we heard ‘For while the tired waves, vainly breaking’ and sank back in a pleasant agony of relief. We whispered the lines affectionately to ourselves, following the speaker, or even kept a word or two ahead of him in order to ...”

“... it is of the nature of science, especially of those branches of science which are spreading into unknown regions, to be continually ...’ Here the draft was left unfinished. It is tantalising not to know what this great man was going to write. But one can guess. And I cannot help concluding that it was his science, Maxwell’s equations, which influenced ...”

“... McEwan has much more assurance and resource, and so has Raymond Carver, a writer virtually unknown in this country who superficially resembles Carey but is – up to now, at any rate – working at quite a different level. All the same, Exotic Pleasures is an accomplished book. So, for that matter, is Bliss, for Carey has narrative energy, and writes ...”

“... as the mother drifts prettily around the house as if she were waiting to be called for some as yet unknown saintly activity – at one point she does levitate a little, to make sure we get the mood, or perhaps just to show how Jack feels about her in memory. All three boys are wary and sceptical throughout, but none of them seems deeply unhappy, even in their ...”

“... fit only for the dustbin. Who were we to look to, then? Why, Sickert, Steer, John, McEvoy: names unknown to Bedford, and even these were not to be mentioned in the same breath as Cézanne.’ Carrington’s art-loving mother found it all ‘rather humiliating’. At the Slade, Tonks summoned his students and told them ‘how very much better pleased he would ...”

“... Literally. We and almost all the characters in the film are surprised to discover a secret cellar, unknown even to the owners of the house it belongs in. This is where the rich might live in the event of a nuclear attack from North Korea. If they knew how to get in, that is.So we are to think of a politics of fear as well as class, or more precisely perhaps of ...”

“... the BM’s ethnographic gallery) in 1985 and continued with Grayson Perry’s Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman in 2011. Revelling in what he had learned in the Paris of Picasso and Tzara to call ‘primitive art’, Paolozzi proceeded as a Surrealist ethnographer whose role in juxtaposing museum objects with works of his own was to defamiliarise and ...”

“... has a name, and a story which matches the account Capa gave of taking the picture. He is a known unknown soldier – his individuality co-opted to speak for all who fell.Everything in this exhibition is shadowed by unresolved questions about what was, what was not, and what might have been. The objects by themselves can explain very little. But the mixture ...”

“... by any half-competent naturalist painter with an eye for the picturesque. The exact location is unknown – perhaps the corner of a ruined church Carus sketched on one of his walks with Friedrich. It was probably painted in his studio in Dresden, which was situated in the same building as the maternity hospital of which he was by this time the ...”