“... by wishful thinking. Works of art are attributed to the few craftsmen whose names we know. The unknown subjects of portraits become the long-lost faces of favoured figures. Crowd-pleasing narratives (some excellent, some less so) fill in the gaps.Two new books offer a welcome contribution to our understanding of this fractured legacy. Christina Faraday’s ...”

“... few years ago, shortly before Bridget came to work for them, when the house was burgled. A person unknown came in through the side door while Borden and his wife had taken one of their rare trips out together; he had loaded her into a trap and set out for the farm they owned at Swansea to ensure his tenant was not bilking him. The girls stayed at home in ...”

“... asked for by Councillor Norman Briggs (deceased), but urgently required by a person or persons unknown. What may the larger purpose be, within the imperatives of which John Stalker has become entangled? It seems reasonable to assume that more is at stake even than the protection of individual RUC officers who may be guilty of serious crimes. The true ...”

“... is even written down: when listening he is as focused and as still as a chipmunk spying something unknown from atop a stone wall. In a large, substantial-looking apartment house built a few years before he was born – and where he was born, for formerly this was the home of his parents – Levi lives with his wife Lucia; except for his year in Auschwitz and ...”

“... interviews for novels, cultural fashions for old-fashioned literary movements, famous names for unknown masterpieces (unless it is that the discovery of the unknown masterpieces, from Lautréamont to Céline, only adds to the cultural capital of the discoverer). It makes perfect sense; my only reservation has to do with ...”

“... on the Agony in the Garden and Cain and Abel with his friend John Colet would have remained unknown – Colet was not one to rush into print – if Erasmus had not written them up and got them into circulation. If Colet’s new St Paul’s School was known abroad, it was Erasmus’s doing. Even Jean Vitrier, coming to England specially to meet Colet ...”

“... Swiss bankers are believed to be buying shares eagerly – and again, they are buying them for unknown clients. Another salient is represented by the Mirror newspapers (the ‘Voice of the People’). The Financial Times wrote on 16 June of developments in that quarter: ‘In the secretive world of national newspaper management’, Clive Thornton ‘is ...”

“... wasn’t just rudimentary but wrong, stating that her date and place of birth and death were unknown. According to the catalogue, the only certainty was that Cahun had been deported for her leftist political activities, as well as her Jewish origins, and had died in a concentration camp. In fact both women survived the war, with Cahun dying in ...”

“... has achieved the impossible, an enigma forever eluding our grasp, one who communicates by hitherto unknown means: Is there an unwritable unknown poem that exceeds anything the technique of writing can do? We will never know. Maybe this is her triumph. She has taken her secret to the grave and will not give up the ghost. To ...”

“... way: your mother will find out that you meet me, and she will influence you against me!’ ‘The unknown,’ she says, ‘always fills my mind with terrible possibilities.’ And again: ‘How terrible it would be if a time should come when I could not love you, my Clym!’ And he: ‘Please don’t say such reckless things. When we see such a time at hand ...”

“... were among the most successful authors. They wrote mostly narrative or social history, revealing unknown territory to generations who had learned almost nothing of Scotland’s past at school. Now, though, the fashion is more reflexive. Tom Devine, currently Scotland’s leading historian, targets myth – aspects of the past which have been either ...”

“... cross-cutting from one fragment to another makes no clear connection between them – code unknown, to invoke the title of a later Haneke film which uses a similar device – yet we expect the pieces to come together in some way to throw light on the story of the killing spree. It’s the edgy young man who eventually goes berserk at the bank, but ...”

“... The cardboard shelters of the Tokyo homeless are well out of sight, and open begging is unknown in Japan, but the old and not-so-old unemployed practise the respectable equivalent, hawking neatly folded newspapers and magazines retrieved from rubbish bins. Meanwhile, Japanese households collectively possess the biggest pool of idle capital in the ...”

“... truth is that Evans was vulnerable, both mentally and physically. He was hospitalised in 1928 for unknown reasons and for an unknown period of time, then later for an ‘appendisodomy’, as he called it, and later still for a perforated ulcer, and twice again for alcoholism and attendant psychiatric problems.Kirstein, who ...”

“... believer. I would argue that the multiple personality of the 1980s was a kind of person previously unknown in the history of the human race. This is a simple idea familiar to novelists, but careful philosophical language is not prepared for it. Pedantry is in order. Distinguish two sentences: A. There were no multiple personalities in 1955; there were many in ...”