“... Mathews argues, ‘what they must translate is not something already known but what is unknown and unpredictable. The writer is an Oho who has just heard what the Uhas say.’ In a further twist he also insists that it is only by venturing into the unknown that writer and reader can hope to make provisionally ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... into action. In September 1906, an Atlanta newspaper printed an extra edition yowling about an unknown black man who had assaulted three white women and got away; could good men no longer protect their women? Thousands of white men were soon racing through the streets. They burst into black businesses and dragged away the proprietors, they stopped ...”

“... in Singer’s life was explained in an introductory note by a Conjunctions associate editor, an unknown 22-year-old American called Jonathan Safran Foer. ‘These pages of Singer’s are not great literature,’ Foer wrote. ‘Surely they were never intended to be published’: But like all great literature, like the stories, plays and poems by which these ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... any decision to go back on the original referendum result would represent another leap into the unknown. Critics of Brexit rightly mock the Churchillian aspirations of its diehard supporters, who see in it a chance for Britain to show what it’s made of by going it alone. We are likely to discover that going it alone in the 21st century just means getting ...”

“... east of Dresden. The journey, more than four hundred miles on a slow train in high summer to an unknown destination, must have been more gruelling than anything he had so far experienced in the war. At one point he witnessed a near riot as hundreds of dehydrated men fought to get at a single outlet where water was being distributed. He refused to join in ...”

“... organisation to prepare the way for the framing of suggestions leading towards this aim’. An unknown professor rises to speak about the path of history, a Frau Weghuber proposes a ‘Great Austrian Franz Joseph Soup Kitchen’, General Stumm puts in a word for the re-equipment of the Army, Frau Tuzzi urges the formation of a baroque structure of ...”

“... or, as he put it, of ‘musical expectancy’. Cécile had written of suffering from ‘an unknown, distant music’, and of a ‘window’ where ‘all the Orient sings in my being’ – a premonition, he claimed, of his career in music, even of his interest in Asia. His mother was absent for much of his childhood, but she ‘never doubted for an ...”

“... Nothing comparable appears to have existed in Sicily until the 1870s, and the word mafia was unknown before then. It arose from two sources. One was the economic crisis which devastated an already precarious economy. The other was the belated integration of Sicily into the political system of the new Italian state, when, in reaction to attempts to ...”

“... re-creates a world in which artists possessed powers, or at least served vital practical purposes, unknown to them today. His claim is that this changed because art came more and more to be cherished for its own sake. This is no doubt correct, but his generalisations need the sort of qualification which would come from considering more evidence. Something ...”

“... the novelists of the rest of the American continent – but the desire to announce some hitherto unknown contender to the world is readily understandable. What is obvious, however, is that Harold Brodkey is not the great missing genius. If anything, he wrote rather better in the days before some people began to mistake him for one. Back in the Fifties he ...”

“... In academia, dedicated Military History positions were very rare, and separate departments unknown. Hence historians burdened with that label could rarely secure appointments, though as authors they always found ample readerships. There has been no great increase in the teaching employment of military historians as such – hardly possible given the ...”

“... doing interviews – men more than women, I suspect, and eminent journalists more than unknown ones. There is a telling passage early in Ms Malcolm’s book when she goes to see McGinniss. ‘I had never interviewed a journalist before,’ she writes, ‘and was curious about what would develop between me and a journalistically ...”

“... The new-found land of the tropics is, Wilson fears, about to disappear for ever. There are other unknown Edens as well. A handful of soil from a Norwegian forest contains five thousand species of bacteria, most new to science. At the other end of the size range, 11 new species of whale have been discovered in the 20th century. The bacteria are probably ...”