“... Canning demanding ‘satisfaction from you’. Duels were certainly uncommon by this time but not unknown. Castlereagh’s challenge took the form of an interminable, whingeing letter complaining about deceit ‘at the expense of my honour and reputation’ and ending: ‘I have the honour to be, sir, your obedient, and humble, Servant.’ This was ...”

“... ship fitted out to carry seven hundred slaves and a hundred crewmen. (An explosion, its cause unknown, destroyed the Parr during its first voyage.) Then there was the Brooks, the most famous of all slave ships. Abolitionists circulated a diagram of the vessel crammed with slaves on both sides of the Atlantic, the era’s most effective piece of visual ...”

“... of them is quite as sinister as the people Unwin discovers lurking deep underground in previously unknown and unimagined departments of the Agency. The plot’s bursting with as many twists and surprises as you could hope for. And as it steams along the smooth rails of Berry’s neatly constructed sentences, barrelling round each well-cambered turn with ...”

“... runs a small business producing material for footballs, encouraged their passion for the sport. Unknown to them, earlier that day armed robbers had been in action close to the cricket field and escaped with some loot. As the boys set off back home on their bikes with a bag containing cricket equipment, someone shouted: ‘It’s the robbers.’ The kids ...”

“... is a retrospective of the esteemed Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-90), who is virtually unknown in the United States. With an extensive array of paintings, drawings, photographs and diaries on view here, one can follow the development of her distinctive version of geometric abstraction; though her art appears intimate, even introspective, it also ...”

“... friends – dancers, painters, actresses, poets, models, many of them queer – are today largely ...”

“... a much larger work on expelling demons, describes ‘exactly what it was like to be visited by an unknown, unidentified ghost of the roaming, malicious hooligan type’. These ghosts ‘flicker like flame’ and ‘flash like lightning’, they cross the thresholds of houses and descend over the rooftops. They frighten, snarl at and otherwise torment the ...”

“... fallen: recently it has been claimed by big fashion designers. (The difference in status between unknown artisans and international designers is rarely parsed in the show.) Bògòlanfini is made by the people of Mali and Burkina Faso. Single strips of cloth are woven on treadle looms and then sewn together to form a larger textile. Its dramatic appearance is ...”

“... in 1910, Winslow Homer was considered one of America’s greatest painters, yet he remains largely unknown in the UK. No work by Homer can be found in a British public collection, and the current retrospective at the National Gallery (until 8 January) is only the second exhibition of his work, though Homer painted a number of English scenes and stayed near ...”

“... not thousands, of wells across the country, multiplying the political cost in order to extract an unknown quantity of gas to sell to a diminishing European market. Neither North Sea gas or shale gas could be produced in sufficient quantities to lower household bills significantly. The calls to drop the green levies don’t stand up to scrutiny either. Almost ...”

“... the Chinese-Cuban painter Wifredo Lam and the Brazilian painter Tarsila do Amaral, to the all but unknown. The curators are especially drawn to adventurous souls who understood Surrealism as a call to travel widely, sometimes on a quasi-ethnographic mission to encounter the other as a means to decentre the self à la Michel Leiris. In 1939 the Swiss-born ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”