“... a similar pattern at the polytechnics, where from the start single-subject honours degrees were unknown, and where modular courses moved towards a Post-Modernist ‘pick and mix’. Sociology was a dominant influence on the ‘new wave’ history of the time. In the new cottage industry of urban history, monographs, when they began to appear, typically ...”

“... that the Scots Guards turned their machine-guns on them. This is not confirmed in The Unknown Army, an admirably thorough, concise and well-written study of First World War mutinies by the late Gloden Dallas and Douglas Gill, though they do observe that the Guards, and the Scottish units, retained a reputation for reliability while the efficiency ...”

“... and over, and each time the results were the same. Finally, Medawar had to concede that, for some unknown reason, cattle twins were an exception to the general rule, which stated that skin grafted between two genetically dissimilar animals would be rejected. Acceptance of what nature demonstrated has to be followed by explanation, and Medawar has always ...”

“... wrote to Thomas Mann after she became his English translator. She was, she said later, an ‘unknown instrument … which … must … serve him to change the garment of his art into a better one which might clothe her for the marketplace until times changed’. ‘Like a lady’s maid,’ Briggs writes, before adding: ‘I know nothing, really, about ...”

“... By the end of the year, 17 security personnel had been killed. The number of civilian deaths is unknown but generally put ‘in the dozens’. In his New Year speech, Biya – now in his mid-eighties – appointed several new Anglophone ministers to his cabinet, but that was all. By the end of January, with the Ambazonian government-in-exile detained by the ...”

“... it, Our free German Rhine, Until its flood has buried The limbs of our last man! Composed by an unknown magistrate’s clerk, the rather trite lines struck the chord of aspiring liberal nationalism in the German Confederation, and before long Schumann and others were setting it to music, hoping to turn it into ‘a German Marseillaise’. ‘Metternich ...”

“... their subtitle proclaims, in virtually every chapter Chang and Halliday have turned up ‘unknown stories’ of Mao. Some, if true, will be big news for historians. Mao amassed a private fortune during the Jiangxi Soviet period; his troops fought only one real battle during the Long March; their break-out from Nationalist military encirclement was ...”

“... on the Ashkenazi civilisation, history, language and frame of mind, all of which are virtually unknown in Italy, except by some sophisticated readers of Joseph Roth, Bellow, Singer, Malamud, Potok, and of course yourself. Levi’s explained intention does not mean that there is no autobiography in the book. The wish to evoke a Jewish resistance to Nazism ...”

“... his art should read the second half of the book first, even though, as a more or less complete unknown, it was a little too soon for him to have had any ‘initiates’. The format of these two books is that of the circus or the music-hall. Turn follows fast on turn, in a frantic accumulation of wonders. For a specimen performance, I take that of ...”

“... fiefs, the two principal Kims can count on levels of support – over 70 percent – virtually unknown outside dictatorial systems. In no country does the gap between what one might call the pays passionnel and the pays électoral appear so great. The tension between them can be seen in the courtroom drama in Seoul, where Generals Chun Doo-Hwan and Roh Tae ...”

“... This pilgrim’s progress is a familiar one for card-carrying Cockneys, a way out, a trip into the unknown. Musician and long-distance pedestrian Jan Wobble recalls his sabbatical as a minicabber, ferrying striped faces south of the river for regular bits of business, cash drops. These heavy suits would sit, white-knuckled, fingers digging into the scarlet ...”

“... Men, and then, in 2001, Princess of Thieves, starring Keira Knightley as Gwyn, the (previously unknown) daughter of Robin and Marian, who rescues her father and his no longer so merry men from the enemies of Prince Philip, ‘a son of King Richard I unknown to history’, as Knight puts it. But Marian could also be ...”

“... rapidly, however, often in the form of Heilkunde, a combination of psychiatry and pedagogy almost unknown in the West. Leo Kanner was a Galician Jew (hence Austrian) who trained in Berlin. During the early and turbulent days of the Weimar Republic he went out to practise in rural South Dakota. He later went east and found his home at Johns Hopkins ...”

“... outside Andhra Pradesh. His gandharva ends the story by soaring off into the sky, destination unknown, calling out to his perplexed English captors that he’d never seen a ‘more childish race’. It’s a subtle piece of work, but Satyanarayana’s version of the encounter between the West and the non-West has nearly been lost to us. The fame that ...”

“... in the Cambridge apartment of Alice Methfessel, the partner of her final years. Still dark. The unknown bird sits on his usual branch. The little dog next door barks in his sleep inquiringly, just once. Perhaps in his sleep, too, the bird inquires once or twice, quavering. Questions – if that is what they are – answered directly, simply, by day ...”