“... and René Olivier. René later claimed that the idea of a pedal-driven two-wheeler came from an unknown workman. At about the same time, a bicycle was developed by a maker of prams and tricycles from Nancy called Pierre Lallement. There is also a faint possibility that the bicycle originated in Scotland, though Herlihy shows this claim to be extremely ...”

“... trained Keats had healed himself, faked his own death and returned to England to work and die unknown among the rural poor under the name of Dr Cake? This scenario is both premise and précis of Andrew Motion’s novella, The Invention of Dr Cake. The action is the deduction of Dr Cake’s secret by the narrator, Dr Tabor. The book is presented in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 3120 in 2011 and 3337 in 2012, with an extra 25 per cent or more unregistered apiaries and an unknown number of registeredbut defunct colonies. According to these data, total honey production in London was nearly 80,000 lb in 2009, going up to 100,000 lb in 2011. In 2012 London’s yield seems to have been even lower than that of the rest of the ...”

“... solidarity was of more practical help. Local jazz writers did everything they could to help an unknown from London, from booking a hotel in Greenwich Village to passing him from one critic to the next for guidance to the scene in some unfamiliar city. It helped that so many promoters of jazz and blues came out of the left-wing milieu of the 1930s and ...”

“... or why the final book has such a markedly different character from the seven that precede it, are unknown and, quite likely, unknowable. Over the centuries, many lessons have been drawn from Thucydides’ writings. Often, his text can be used to support radically opposing theses. Some foreign policy analysts have seen his tale of the downfall of imperial ...”

“... is a relic of rioting by Muslim mobs who had tried to torch the bar, their petrol supplied by unknown fixers in a ‘dim Mercedes’. As a footnote explains, in Nigeria the Mercedes is a ‘talismanic’ symbol of local Big Men. In 1993 these men were busy organising ‘spontaneous riots’ – against Abiola’s supporters, non-Muslims, opponents of all ...”

“... neither he nor Micòl has any notion of just how little time she has, along with the thousands of unknown Italian Jews who will accompany her to a hideous death. In the novel’s epilogue the narrator tells us that the story of his relationship with Micòl ends with the last glimpse he has of her in the cortège following her brother’s corpse to the family ...”

“... in the plate-tectonic dance). In the process, Fortey and his colleagues revealed a previously unknown ancient sea and struck a blow against those geologists who had put their faith in the magnetic evidence according to which this water should not have existed. In his enjoyable new book, Fortey surveys the current state of knowledge about the Earth, and ...”

“... say, or Mum out shopping, I imagine less speed and more caution at the edges, due to the unknown in the halo of things. The huge effort of invention, or recollection, or both, with which a collective life is animated is Richler’s triumph in these books. With the close focus of a child she has gathered up the details and digressions which add up to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 1961 by Jean-Pierre Richard, under the title Pour un Tombeau d’Anatole, they revealed a largely unknown side of Mallarmé, one which even now disturbs the idea of him as the poet of pristine impersonality and detachment. My translation here is based on Bertrand Marchal’s 1998 Pléiade edition of Mallarmé’s Oeuvres complètes. These notes provide a ...”

“... 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 ...”