“... some twelve thousand species; today there are at least 1.8 million named species, and many more unknown. But what is a species? Since Darwin, biologists have caricatured Linnaeus as the arch-defender of the fixity of species. It is true that in his earlier works Linnaeus stated that God had created a fixed number of species; seeming novelties, such as the ...”

“... as Shaftesbury’s comment makes clear, it allowed magic, lust and cruelty to be portrayed as unknown, foreign and inimical. This double dynamic, sometimes contained within a single individual’s response, both attracts readers to the stories and repels them. Anthony Hamilton, an urbane Jacobite aristocrat and soldier, living in Paris in exile at the ...”

“... might be misdirection of the sort that enables something secret to enter the room. Could this unknown white session musician in fancy dress actually be an authentic Louisiana hoodoo man, a root doctor, a gris-gris man? Is the whole thing so fake it’s real? The answers Toop comes up with are fittingly strange. Gris-Gris turns out to be a rich mix of ...”

“... became – I found what can only be called ‘a slim volume’, with limp covers, in an unknown script and language. I don’t remember Aunt Ann translating one line from its pages, nor ever explaining how she came to own it. But she told me some facts about the woman who wrote it – the first time I heard those words: Anna Akhmatova ...”

“... of booze, snobbery, sodomy and that hopelessly abstract tenderness for the lower classes, unknown except as subordinates and bed fellows. Some scenes, some dialogue, remind one of the early Angus Wilson. Others recall Anthony Powell’s Poussin-dominated series of novels and also, at moments, that writer’s earlier work. Yet Banville’s own style is ...”

“... cast in plaster so that the imprints of their soles can be compared with those of the 15-year-old unknown who may be the narrator’s brother. The macabre element is reinforced by a chance encounter with a hearse-driver in the carpark outside the university canteen, which, the driver tells them, is famous for its ‘cordon bleu’ cooking. This loquacious ...”

“... Helen Demuth had a son, Freddy, who became a close friend of Eleanor’s. Freddy’s father was unknown. When Engels was dying, Eleanor asked him: ‘Who is Freddy’s father?’ Engels, who had already lost the power of speech, took a pencil and wrote: ‘KM is FD’s father.’ Eleanor was distressed beyond measure. However, when Freddy died he was buried ...”

“... view to proving that they were arranged by Catullus himself, and not, as is often claimed, by some unknown posthumous editor. They are set out in three groups, according to length and metre. The first 60 poems, which are fairly short, are written in a variety of metres and generally described as the polymetrics. In the centre of the book is a series of long ...”

“... trained in Flanders, the artistic centre of the Burgundian Netherlands. Van Eyck’s work was not unknown to Valencian painters, but no other Spanish artist of this period achieved anything like Bermejo’s mastery of Netherlandish technique, and nothing is known about the only two Flemings living in Valencia who could perhaps have trained him. The Prado ...”

“... Soviet Union began to falter. After the end of the Cold War, Ukraine gave the Tatars a previously unknown freedom. It is that freedom that is now at ...”

“... he may loken over a gret high hous.’ (As Mandeville is himself a fictional appellation for an unknown man, some laxity in measurements is to be expected.) But though so tall, they are hospitable to the small. They have been known to host tiny yellow-billed oxpeckers on their bodies: the small birds remove ticks from their skin, and clean the food from ...”

“... that ‘I take it for granted that their thinking’ – he is referring also to Thoreau – ‘is unknown to the culture whose thinking they worked to found (I mean culturally unpossessed, unassumable among those who care for books, however possessed by shifting bands of individuals), in a way it would not be thinkable for Kant and Schiller to be ...”

“... the Macedonian proposition that refugees be driven to Skopje airport and shoved on aeroplanes to unknown destinations, airport officials donned their masks before the refugees were even off the buses. When they came through the metal detectors and the young men were frisked, the officials added surgical gloves to their repertoire of insults. As one busload ...”

“... The authorities deployed bayonets and firearms. At least twenty rioters were killed, and an unknown number injured on both sides. Three young men were hanged for public order offences. The police, speculating wildly to draw attention from themselves, blamed the riots on organised crime, or on persons unknown – men ...”

“... in an Irish jaunting car.’ And it can express the weariness and confusion of travelling through unknown terrain: at such times, it is a form of tolerance of the strange country and of one’s own unsuspected weaknesses. Interestingly, such entries have that knowing bewilderment we associate with Kafka: the unsettling experience of alienation from one’s ...”