“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... violence. Teachers don’t dish out much in the way of punishment. Expulsion is pretty much unknown. Two boys in my son’s class tried to cut off another boy’s finger with a pair of scissors. Their punishment was to be kept in at break. I have been going to karate twice a week with my son for the last ten months. We practise hard. Over the next few ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... several countries there was fought what is still, to most people in Britain and America, a quite unknown war in which ordinary people, of their own free will, endured hunger, cold, torture and death to rid themselves not just of foreign occupation but of the whole root and branch, the causes and the effects, of fascist ideology. As Mr Davidson says, ‘the ...”

“... the first time (at Memel in April 1807). The Tsar was impressed by the forthright views of this unknown soldier, and sent his personal surgeon to tend his wounds. After the fresh disaster at Friedland in June, Barclay pressed a strategic plan for the defeated Russians to retreat deep into Russia and thus lure on the French to over-extended ...”

“... contrast, Harris made a brilliant selection: Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, who was largely unknown nationally and is the type of Midwestern progressive populist that American politics hasn’t seen in decades. He is straight out of a 1950s sitcom as All-American Dad: beloved teacher, coach who took the losing high school football team to the state ...”

“... of eminent visitors), before passing after the Dissolution of the Monasteries through the hands of unknown collectors. The Latin text still has its original red leather goatskin binding: the earliest Western bookbinding to survive, containing the oldest intact European book, and the whole thing in such astonishingly good condition that it seems to flicker ...”

“... presented here represent mysteries which can only be resolved by an appeal to principles as yet unknown. As often as not, they seem to represent nothing more than good old-fashioned muddles, of the kind which human thinkers habitually get into when they carry over their familiar concepts into unfamiliar territory. At the risk of being accused of teaching ...”

“... Her one positive act is to have had a brief affair with a middle-aged Jew in Italy and afterwards, unknown to him, to bear his child. She has not seen him again. The child is now nine months old, cared for with her own family by Constance’s sister, long despised for her conventional virtues, but now turning up trumps. Constance’s last positive act is to ...”

“... the musicological evidence); while the C major, beloved by Britten, is a fairly recent discovery, unknown at the time when the scholars said the D major was Kraft’s. Now, how can one, in the circumstances, report the Rostropovich-Britten recording of ‘a Haydn concerto’? The interest of the occasion depends on our knowledge of the work recorded – which ...”

“... Kiplings, a researcher on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, sifting data on the reburial of unknown soldiers from 1915, cross-checked a discrepant map reference and proved a hitherto anonymous body to be John Kipling’s. He was one of the first in his regiment of very many. Some years after the war Kipling wrote a moving story called ‘The ...”

“... of his home and heritage to the source of his own history in the South. He leaps into the unknown too and discovers that ‘if you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.’ With each of these novels, Toni Morrison has been inching her way back beyond 20th-century experiencing of racism, poverty and injustice towards its origins in the history of ...”