“... lesson’. In Domeniko there is now a monument to the massacre, but it is almost completely unknown in Italy.Filippo Focardi’s study, published in Italian in 2013 and now translated into English by Paul Barnaby, unpacks these silences and assumptions. Crucial to his analysis are the linked, binary stereotypes of the ‘good Italian’ and the ‘bad ...”

“... year earlier, French armies had torched the town of Lunéville and with it La Tour’s home and an unknown quantity of his work: but his allegiance remained evidently to the force that was extirpating Lorraine’s sovereignty. The little else that we know of the public man is not appealing. A 1646 deposition from Lunévillians, complaining of an ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... guard. Almost everyone was wearing a face-mask. I spent the night brooding about the proximity of unknown people and the poorly circulated air. Hypochondria is infectious, I thought. Over the following weekend – 26-27 April – things started to get odd. Each day began with thick fog, pushed unwillingly aside by a cold sun. Police cars circled the streets ...”

“... shirt like that, she had wanted one very much, but she had never had one. The photo is of her unknown twin. Berts had told the nuns at the Stella Maris Home that he could not manage to look after the both of them; the second daughter, Rose, would have to be offered for adoption. At this point Enright is faced, like all tellers of tales about twins, with ...”

“... expedition was a triumph of surveying – they managed to chart hundreds of miles of previously unknown coastline – but their inexperience in polar travel and inadequate supplies meant that the journey back to civilisation, across the ‘Barren Ground’, turned into a catastrophe. Food ran out while they were still days from safety, and the men were ...”

“... Washington Post at the end of June, Barton Gellman and Jo Becker revealed much that was previously unknown, if not entirely unsuspected, about the way Cheney operates. Gellman and Becker’s series was more concerned with Cheney’s methods than with his motives (Halliburton is mentioned only once), and this was surely the right emphasis: what politicians do ...”

“... who first subjected him to a Jesuitical interview that takes place in another stage set – an unknown room, three chairs and a single bed, a cellphone and an alarm clock. There is a beseeching, earnest boy, an arrogant, dismissive woman, and a suitcase full of money, to be taken to Budapest for an arms deal. These stock situations might have something to ...”

“... from Miller’s office at night; in Miller’s discovery that Barbara Hellerman was killed by an unknown assailant in the New York subway. Violence against women is no longer a controlling device wielded by the thought police but something real. There are no redundant details in The Horned Man. A lot may remain unexplained, but it’s hard to find anything ...”

“... the Japan Folk Crafts Museum. Spanning two centuries, it juxtaposed traditional craft work by unknown makers with pieces by the founders of Mingei – the potters Soetsu Yanagi and Shoji Hamada – and others, with relatively slight commentary. This almost purely aesthetic approach has given way to a more critical evaluation of Mingei’s own complicated ...”

“... silence on the matter was maintained so successfully by his descendants that the facts were unknown outside the family until 1916, when the Princeton scholar George McLean Harper broke the news.) Quite what part Wordsworth otherwise took in these violent times is obscure, but in old age he told an inquirer that he was ‘pretty hot in it’, and his ...”

“... of all those aunts and uncles and cousins who had gathered together at Christmas, and of the two unknown Greene grandfathers … and then I thought of the novel, the story of a hunted man, of smuggling and treachery, of murder and suicide, and I wondered what on earth he was driving at. I wonder still.’ But he didn’t really, because in his mind he had ...”

“... life. I couldn’t hop onto a transatlantic flight, but I could at least make expeditions into an unknown language, and it would alter my brain just the same: ‘This confrontation with the densely printed text in the unknown language turned out to be oddly exhilarating. It was like diving, or jumping, into the deep, cold ...”

“... of the Month Club in the US. For a non-American non-novelist to be a Book of the Month choice was unknown. But as Russell Banks points out in the preface to The Hurly Burly, Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Bowen, Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg had led a campaign on Coppard’s behalf. In the 1970s, he had another revival in the UK after a couple of his stories were ...”

“... word can never do justice to the object; it is foreign to it, as if indifferent. But the unknown name may also hurl us into a world of ideas and images … where we encounter things wondrous and strange and come back full of them.’ In November 1927, Magritte went a step further with his ‘metamorphosis’ paintings, which show ‘an object ...”