“... 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 ...”

“... but the simile, back-to-front though it may be, works because it shows he considers himself in unknown and potentially dangerous territory. It’s there for our benefit, not Randeep’s. Because Sahota doesn’t explain everything straightaway, or translate the Punjabi phrases he uses, or spell out the meaning of Sikh customs and rituals, the uninformed ...”

“... but she didn’t believe that meant the perpetrator had been caught. ‘The real killers are unknown,’ she said. At Mirwais Hospital, death records were kept in handwritten registries. I looked on as workers leafed through what they called the death book; perhaps ten women had been murdered in any given month. In September 2016, a woman named Babo had ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... be determined, or gained, or changed, in the next three to six months? Waiting further, for some unknown sign of unforeseeable change, can only foster more paralysis among a concerned international community: a paralysis that enables Israel to complete its bantustan strategy in the West Bank. In fact, those governments and NGOs attempting to lobby harder for ...”

“... and with the elegiac sentiment which underlies all Wordsworth’s strongest poetry: She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her Grave, and Oh! The difference to me. The death of this imagined child was followed by the loss of real children: his three-year-old daughter Catharine and her six-year-old brother Thomas ...”

“... for Fr Leahy, but only as it once was for those early Christian monks who rowed away into the unknown. All Trevor’s narrative gifts are evident in this story. The short paragraphs, cut and chiselled, are those of a puritan stylist. Vital pieces of information are quietly slipped in in mid-paragraph. The technique is the Joycean epiphany: a state of ...”

“... his face is partly obscured, the guy kissing his girlfriend at an airport – location and date unknown – on page 51 of the posthumously compiled Arrivals & Departures – looks incredibly like the young Bob Dylan. He even has a pen in his shirt pocket! During this deranged phase of research I was also struck by the way that Winogrand himself looked, for ...”

“... Galen into his service. But hopes of an action sequence are quickly disappointed. Galen, for unknown reasons, declined to accompany the emperor; he stayed in Rome attending Commodus, the emperor’s son and heir, along with other physicians, a sinecure that helped make possible his huge outpouring of prose. He recorded only one face-to-face encounter ...”

“... what he called ‘the fifth dimension’: a mix of moral philosophy, humility in the face of the unknown, Wellsian science and hedging his bets. I went to Shrewton because I miss him and it was one way of carrying on our talks, but I was also prompted by reading the Victoria County History of Wiltshire, which reveals that on Census Sunday 1851, 350 ...”

“... and equally ambitious. Yet unlike the energetic Mrs Beeton, the author of Le Ménagier de Paris is unknown and unknowable. He adopts the voice of ‘Husband’, addressing his ‘Young Wife’ and offering moral guidance, advice on hospitality and food and several cautionary tales, told in styles ranging from terse prose to poetry, as well as treatises on ...”

“... a word to anyone, the ingrate abandoned his father and his paternal abode and departed for lands unknown. At first all seemed charming to him; the flowers were of a freshness, the trees of a greenness that he had never seen at home – and then, he saw so many wonders: an animal with a tail larger than its body (it was a squirrel), a little creature that ...”

“... crowd in black turtlenecks and trenchcoats, and they have a certain sophistication. The least unknown of Basara’s novels is Fama o biciklistima (1988) – speculatively, ‘The Fuss about Cyclists’ – and I looked up a copy to find out what the fuss was about. It turns out that I understand less Serbian than I thought I did, but the book appears to ...”

“... the most striking developments were tied to slavery, which produced extremes of wealth and poverty unknown in other regions. The free economy of small farmers and a merchant class with a few grandees and many more ambitious shopkeepers produced less dramatic results. American farmers sought a decent ‘competence’ that would sustain both themselves and their ...”

“... to be harsh. He won’t tell the reader what is meant by a ‘boortree’ or a ‘cuas’, equally unknown to me and the OED. You could probably guess from the context that ‘stocious’ is Irish for ‘drunk’ but even an Irishman I consulted could not explain ‘pochles’, which occurs in the same line. However, ‘pobby’ means ‘swollen’ and a ...”