“... with the stooped mutterings of Robert Boyle, John Aubrey and Robert Hooke, so, Wall suggests, the unknown woman at home, experimenting with endive and plantin, or (in Partridge’s words) trussing woodcocks ‘into the Coffyn with swete larde around them’, was taking part in the same process of probing what Bacon described as nature ‘in bonds’: ‘when ...”

“... Weissbort), Lleshanaku is material, then metaphorical, then material again: The search for unknown words is a complete failure. They have all been discovered. They are round and soft, without mystery little planets festering with ants too tired to mount a hobo’s shoe.Poetry to her is chiefly a mode of inquiry. ‘What was it like? What happened? How ...”

“... in the country, to have lawsuits, to lend usuriously and recklessly, to walk his poor spirit upon unknown paths, and to believe himself capable of the very greatest works.’ Jean Antoine Tousard was sent to the château of Bicêtre on 21 April 1701: ‘Apostate friar, seditious, capable of the greatest crimes, sodomite, atheist if it were possible; this is a ...”

“... and jewel-encrusted cups; ‘an affluent Egyptian woman named Chratiankh (birth and death dates unknown)’ whose tomb inscription was said to read: ‘I was a mistress of drunkenness, one who loved a good day, who looked forward to [having sex] every day, anointed with myrrh and perfumed with lotus scent.’Alcohol legislation, O’Meara notes, is often ...”

“... who happened to be German. On publication, there was some surprise at the confidence of this unknown writer. In fact, ‘Lermolieff’ was the pseudonym, by way of an imprecise anagram, of a retired Italian politician called Giovanni Morelli.Morelli wasn’t simply spoiling for a fight. Art criticism, he thought, suffered from a serious failing: no one ...”

“... with fulcrums installed along the wall, children rising on one side as their unknown playmates descend on the other. The more absurd the tweaks they suggest, the more arbitrary and hostile the project of border fortification begins to look. Rael praises a risky, revisionist essay by the American architect Lebbeus Woods on Israel’s ...”

“... the brittle wrists and yellowed skin, the nicks and weals and livid pink burn marks of unknown origin – and realised I was already way along on that project. It was go home or die, and home was an oblivion that was at least reversible.Home is somewhere in Co. Mayo: ‘a roundabout off a national road, an industrial estate, a five-screen ...”

“... Aradia: The Gospel of the Witches, published in 1899, professes to be the gospel of a previously unknown witch-religion practised by a secret society in northern Italy; Leland claimed he had been given the text by an Italian magician. It’s still in print, but no trace of the religion, the society or the magician has ever been found. Aradia looks very like ...”

“... of paranoia, deformed by fear and greed, or we opened the door to Africa and set forth into the unknown ... Creina and Neil Alcock were pioneers in the country South Africa will one day become – a truly African country, where whites have no guarantees. They arrived in Africa years ahead of the rest of us, and I have told you what befell them there. It was ...”

“... in the career of Robert Morrison, the early 19th-century pioneer of British Sinology, and is not unknown today. Foucquet’s heart is, like St Jerome’s, in his library – but the saint had a more tractable companion. His hiring of John Hu, a catechist and gate-keeper at the Jesuit’s Canton mission, was a last-minute expedient to outwit his ...”

“... enlisted man of the first scene, troubled with guilt over having exhumed the bones of the Czech Unknown Soldier, thinks: ‘Even a statue can bring forth divine retribution; he had once seen an opera about it.’ On cue, the stone Commandatore from Don Giovanni is soon seen in performance. Heydrich makes a ceremonial speech in which he invokes the statue of ...”

“... In 1967 Enid Starkie prefaced her two-volume account with a portrait of ‘Gustave Flaubert by an unknown painter’ – thereby managing to rip off his entire face in one go, since the picture was in fact of Louis Bouilhet. Sartre was less of an impression-taker, more an imposer. In L’Idiot de la Famille he seared the novelist with a terrifying theoretical ...”

“... always have in sight the yellow dayglo X marked on his back. The blizzard made our neighbourhood unknown. We could neither see behind us nor before. We felt in that white-out world we were alone looking for landmarks, lost, until we saw the unmistakable MacDonald’s M with its ‘60 billion served’ hamburger count. Living, we were numbered among them, and ...”

“... revealed how the tension was affecting her by banishing me from the television station for some unknown crime on the night of the 15th. Although Saad was profuse in apology the next morning, when the bombing began the television station was top of my hit list. I had also developed an aversion to the airport, as a result of repeatedly filming dignitaries ...”

“... to a national conference of experts the following year was leaked to the West ‘by means unknown to me’, and appeared without attribution in the Washington Post. In those fading days of the Brezhnev regime, when it was acceptable to criticise constructively the problems of the system ‘within the family’ but not in front of outsiders, she and ...”