“... who or what is sacred. When on 11 November 1920 George processed bareheaded with the coffin of the Unknown Warrior to its interment in Westminster Abbey, he did so at the urging of the archbishop of Canterbury, who was unhappy that the king had agreed to inaugurate the ‘pagan’ Cenotaph on the same day. Ridley’s worldly sensibility plays down George’s ...”

“... or abandoned. In each case what beliefs were being rejected, and what came in their place, are unknown. All we can say is that there may have been as many as five different ages of prehistoric paganism, signalled by different kinds of archaeological remains. There are things, though, that persist. Folk superstition isn’t the same as organised ...”

“... the tropics, because the ash cloud reached both poles, but beyond that the location of the ‘1809 Unknown’ remains a mystery. For Tambora, however, there are eyewitness accounts. Stamford Raffles, then the lieutenant-governor of Java, wrote about the eruption in a footnote to his History of Java (1817): at the distance of three hundred miles, it seemed to ...”

“... Room of Liverpool Street Station. Standing transfixed for perhaps hours, in a room hitherto unknown to him (and about to be demolished, to enable an expansion of the Victorian station), he feels as if the space contains ‘all the hours of my past life, all the suppressed and extinguished fears and wishes I had ever entertained’. He suddenly sees, in ...”

“... Times declined to mention the CIA’s central role in Mossadegh’s overthrow – it was the then unknown agency’s first major operation of the Cold War. Welcoming the shah on his visit to the United States in 1954, the Times exulted: ‘Today Mossadegh is where he belongs – in jail. Oil is flowing again into the free markets of the world.’ Iran, it ...”

“... the plates record. The ‘elixir’, Benjamin writes, ‘that might act as a developing agent is unknown’. And while Baudelaire doesn’t possess this vital developing fluid, he is somehow, ‘thanks to infinite mental efforts’, able to read the plates. ‘He alone is able to extract from the negatives of essence a presentiment of its real picture. And ...”

“... a viewer, seeing) something that is truly senseless and preposterous as it comes into being, unknown and unidentifiable, and therefore, if you’re lucky, a glimpse of freedom, a unique particular, a way to slip off the mind-forg’d manacles. The zigzags are the manacles. I hope my elation at the yellow and blue wasn’t just the constable’s ...”

“... breathless dispatches from history’s front line, to be endlessly recycled thereafter for reasons unknown. Instead, Runciman puts down the texts’ durability to grammatical modality. They swap the indicative or imperative mood for what he calls, at the end of the book, ‘optative’ sociology. This neither describes nor directly enjoins, but imagines how ...”

“... I knew to be the 21-year-old Shmiel while the identity of the other one was impossible to guess, unknown and unknowable . . . Unknown and unknowable: this could be frustrating, but also produced a certain allure. The photographs of Shmiel and his family were, after all, more fascinating than the other family pictures ...”

“... one leads to the other. He does however say that the apprehension of the symbol suggests some ‘unknown’ (unbekannte) connection between the theoretical and the practical spheres, and that such a connection is often implicit in the common language, as when we attribute moral qualities to non-human things; so a tree may be ‘majestic’ or fields ...”

“... Keith Rowe and the drummer Eddie Prévost in the ensemble AMM (an acronym whose meaning remains unknown). In 1968, as revolutionary ideas spread through institutions of higher education, notably art schools, Cardew was asked to set up an experimental music workshop at Morley College, an adult education centre in South London. His class attracted musical ...”

“... who makes the bullets for the agent to fire. A brilliant agent will typically have an arsenal unknown to the client, and unknown to anyone. Such an agent will know what the plan is before the client is out of bed in the morning. He will build a career, not do a deal; he will see the bumps in the road and smooth them, or ...”

“... turns out that they’re all attracted by a mysterious document entrusted to Barthes by persons unknown, a document that had vanished by the time he reached the hospital. This short text had to do with a ‘seventh function of language’, a phrase that Simon is able to unpack with reference to the functions ...”

“... her concerns. Once the novel has reached its climax, the marriage that ensues remains unseen and unknown. Emma (1815) is unusual even in describing, in its final paragraph, the heroine’s wedding. But the fact that Austen herself had a keen sense of what her characters did next was revealed by her nephew and early biographer, James Edward Austen-Leigh. He ...”