“... but he also sought instruction from two uncannily elegant objects he acquired, plaster casts of an unknown Javanese dancer’s right and left arms. Elegant, but inanimate. No wonder he sought out stasis. The hands of the young dancers were adapted to a precise and disciplined school of movement over long years of training. Wrist, palm, thumb and fingers ...”

“... and many other flora and fauna common in those days.’ Some of these creatures are unknown even to Book of Beasts, though the cinnomolgus, or cinnamon bird, is featured.As Morrison points out, even those of us ignorant of bestiaries use phrases that originate with them. ‘Crocodile tears’ comes from the cunning cocodrill; ‘licking ...”

“... the water from reaching his lips, condemning him to an early death.These voyages into the unknown promote the idea of Alexander, pupil of Aristotle, as a seeker of knowledge. A strange text first found embedded in the Alexander Romance, and later in stand-alone Latin and Old English versions, purports to be a letter from Alexander to Aristotle ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for some reason, we carry on reading.’ The book begins with a sense of brutal inevitability. An unknown voice speaks flatly in a silent room: ‘The end of this story – are you sure you want to know? – is this: the girl dies.’ A beat passes. ‘Hello? No reaction at all?’ What follows is a circuitous jailhouse confession from a domestic worker who ...”

“... the terms for an initial ceasefire that Putin is offering the Americans in private is unknown, we have a pretty good idea what he wants, which is not so much peace as its evil twin, victory. The degree to which the US pushes back or endorses Putin’s demands could be the first test of how far Trump speaks for America. There are still ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the overwhelming theme, the eventual comfort. But burying infants we bury the future, unwieldy and unknown, full of promise and possibilities, outcomes punctuated by our rosy hopes. The grief has no borders, no limits, no known ends and the little infant graves that edge the corners and fence-rows of every cemetery are never quite big enough to contain that ...”

“... In much the same way, the first three Official Secrets Acts may have been directed more at unknown future subversives than at the foreign spies who provided their excuse. It cannot be a mere accident that these successive entrenchments of the principle that governments could choose their own targets for surveillance roughly coincided with the moments ...”

“... has been very well translated by George Holoch. The book’s frequent references to French names unknown across the Channel could put English readers off: but curiosity may prevail with a British public which finds itself abruptly transported into the unfamiliar territory of French political life under the Third and Fourth Republics. The book was written ...”

“... if a shade nervously, he discourses about what scientists are doing to the atom; while he writes, unknown to him, the first atom bomb is being prepared for delivery. Leacock enjoyed being Canada’s leading ‘character’. At the same time, he was a good university administrator and a good educator. A contemporary description of him says: ‘He has a fine ...”

“... story set in Italy). The title page attributes this quarto to one Robert Yarington, otherwise unknown as an author. He was probably only the copyist – a Robert Yarington is recorded as a member of the Scriveners’ Company in 1603, and had a brother, John, who was also a scrivener (i.e. professional scribe) – though his role may well have extended to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”