“... on with a tar brush. In a celebrated instance she flatly declared that ‘warfare is practically unknown among the Arapesh’ and went on to romanticise at length about the educational correlates of their lack of aggression. Derek Freeman was not the first professional anthropologist to find such slapdash generalisation academically intolerable. One of Reo ...”

“... occasion upon which Belloc produced it. This is entirely harmless. But anecdotes of a similarly unknown provenance and of a more damaging sort continue to float around. There are several about Belloc’s behaviour at church services. From Mr Wilson we learn that when Belloc’s son-in-law, Reginald Jebb, was being received into the Catholic ...”

“... The mazy development through the Georgian age of state responsibility for social ills remains unknown territory. Coram’s world coped with its social sores because they remained small enough. The festers of darkest Britain became epidemic in the 19th century: paupers and unemployed, starving Irishmen, displaced Highlanders, the homeless and the ...”

“... have served to protect the painted reliefs with which so many of the blocks had been decorated. Unknown quantities of these blocks still support or are enclosed in many of the Theban monuments: to date, more than forty-five thousand of them have been removed by engineers engaged in stabilising and rebuilding the shattered temples. At Karnak and Luxor ...”

“... so easy to understand. When he wrote about the entries to the competition for a monument to ‘The Unknown Political Prisoner’, readers’ letters filled pages. While other critics valued art as free expression, Berger suggested that freedom might be destructive. While others wrote about what it was like to look at a painting, he wrote about what it was like ...”

“... literature of conscientious objection, of dissent. It derives from the feeling that the nation is unknown or unrecognisable to itself. Its project is to reveal a divided nation at the very moment of the dissidents’ defeat. At its best, though, it is not just a genre mesmerised by the spectre of the victim, but a record of the toil and ingenuity of survivors ...”

“... a pinch of salt, as Stephen said of himself, and his writings were often slighted. His journals, unknown till fairly recently, would no doubt have been slighted too, had they been accessible earlier: they are his masterpiece. Both men were hero-worshippers who sought fathers in the great, with Auden a less considerate and no less acerbic parent than ...”

“... for a recount, was shot dead outside her house by men on motorbikes, whose identities remain unknown. Was this ordered by the MQM or carried out by a pair of executioners acting without authority? We don’t know and the MQM has denied responsibility. It always does. If there is a difference between the defeated and the victors it is this: Zardari and ...”

“... like a drug: the passenger is getting high, taking a trip, stealing a momentary vision of the unknown. Early balloonists claimed that it was literally intoxicating: Dr Alexander Charles described the first flight by hydrogen balloon in 1783 as ‘a sort of physical rapture’, and the American pioneer John Wise insisted that the experience ‘never fails ...”

“... slave states. How the twins and their wives reacted to the curiosity about their private lives is unknown. By one measure – fertility – the marriages were successful: between them, Chang and Eng Bunker fathered 21 children. Eventually, after they moved to a large farm in Surry County, the twins organised a system to preserve marital and fraternal ...”

“... think of myself as religious I am a bit like the Greeks mentioned in Acts, who had an altar to the Unknown God. Everybody’s gods are OK by me. My Muslim neighbour has been known to sacrifice a sheep at Eid on his terrace; most of the others in the road were brought up as Catholics. I am also visited by a persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Spanish and ...”

“... indeed, ‘Look at me.’ And I do not go back on this. For once a thing is known it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten. And writing is the enemy of forgetfulness, of thoughtlessness. For the writer there is no oblivion. Only endless memory. What Brookner’s projected novelist has to say here sounds a different kind of contemporary note. The ...”

“... name. Amélie Lang was on her birth certificate – her mother was Clara Lang, her father’s name unknown. For a time she called herself Fernande Belvallé. It was not clear when she became Fernande Olivier – perhaps when she left her husband, Paul-Emile Percheron, in 1900. She had met him the previous year when she was 17. She disliked his swarthy looks ...”

“... from the camps and cured of cancer, wants nothing more than to be left alone to write. He is unknown, a schoolmaster in the provincial town of Ryazan who at nights and weekends fills page after page – line crammed to line, on both sides of the leaf-thin paper – with his minute ‘onion-seed’ handwriting. He burns his rough copies for safety, and ...”

“... victims were known to be embarrassed because they had lost valuables and monies which were unknown to the tax authorities; Leroy had made off with the weekend takings of four supermarkets; Mesrine was a specialist in robbing banks and had most recently kidnapped a millionaire and attacked a casino. British observers must have been flattered to see that ...”