“... only be boring and tasteless.’He likes to say that decipherment proceeds from the known to the unknown. But the task is arduous even when – as with the Rosetta Stone – you have a text in an undeciphered script next to the same text in a known one. For Desset, who had no biscript, the best course was to look for similar objects from the same ...”

“... cake and eating it. Until we can be shown some criteria by which we may decide whether a hitherto unknown figure should be classified as a ‘Humanist’ or not, we should perhaps refrain from using the word at all. Such criteria Dr Fox has lamentably failed to supply. Dr Guy’s half of the book is concerned with the Henrician age from the Reformation ...”

“... people ... the men often seemed to me bitter and with-drawn.’ Kroeber mused that ‘for some unknown reason, the culture had simply gone hypochondriac.’ What Kroeber never mentioned was that between 1848, the start of the gold rush, and 1910, the Yurok population in that region was reduced from about two and a half thousand individuals to ...”

“... border post between Lithuania and Belorussia where seven Lithuanian border guards were murdered by unknown assailants to the intense embarrassment of Gorbachev. I went there one month after the killings. The Lithuanians showed no reticence in their grief. Men and women cried together at the makeshift shrine behind the shabby border hut where the guards had ...”

“... are delivered – if they are delivered – Rostock will look like Jarrow in 1932. An even greater unknown is the state of human capital. There is a notion, in some parts of the West, that all you have to do is to dangle incentives in front of people and they will jump. Some will. Some East Germans have done so and are doing so, by moving West or ...”

“... of painting with the broadest brush.’ One does not have to look far for such a statesman. The unknown who became prime minister in 1923, ‘a new man, a nobody of nobodies, created an era of good feeling, a lurch towards the practical centre that was to calm, steady and unify the nation through two decades’; Stanley Baldwin was ‘the greatest healer ...”

“... and electromagnetic forces. The problem is that the explanation of this asymmetry is currently unknown, and constitutes one of the main theoretical gaps (the other being how to incorporate gravity into the overall picture) which a Final Theory of Nature is designed to bridge. Weinberg suggests what such a theory might be like, and ventures to say what it ...”

“... Does it refer to the new baby on the way, or to the young child so rapidly turning into someone unknown to his parents, or to the seemingly demure but menacing nanny hired to look after him? Or is it all a little stranger than that? What does ‘looking after’ mean? Are not the structures and vocabulary of ‘childminding’ a little odder than most? Do ...”

“... first novel: ‘I heard with the tremor of excitement that an entomologist feels at the news of an unknown butterfly sighted in the depths of the forest, that behind Auden and Spender and Isherwood stood the even more legendary figure of ... Edward Upward.’ For Upward, this was quite a load to carry, and it was all the heavier perhaps because he could not be ...”

“... not, for me, fulfil the requirement of good travel writing to illuminate the known as well as the unknown. They form part of the authorial vainglory which is the subject of my second complaint. When a book begins, ‘While travelling through Central Asia at the age of 19, seeking some elusive land where childhood dreams and present realities might come face ...”

“... Extraordinary though it may seem, the activities of Unit 731 (and related outfits) were virtually unknown to most Japanese at least until 1976, when a Japanese television documentary was made on the subject. And the cat was only truly let out of the bag in 1982, with the publication of The Devil’s Gluttony, a fictionalised account written by Morimura ...”

“... decisive achievements in all fields are impersonal and their authors are for the most part unknown.’ Le Corbusier’s various urban plans, steadily developed from 1922 onwards into what became known as the Ville Radieuse, incorporated all that Wright detested. In it ‘the discoverer’ proposed an apartment city with a population density of 400 ...”

“... newspaper. Scharf’s London of course is Dickens’s London too. One can easily imagine them, unknown to each other, repeatedly passing on the streets and loitering to take in a new sight, each storing up the characteristic particulars of a given locale, Scharf with sketch-pad in hand, Dickens with its equivalent in his absorbent senses and memory. In ...”

“... tale of how ‘our douce Scotch Commander-in-Chief’ stopped for coffee at an estaminet which, unknown to him but not to passing Staff, a notorious lady from Paris had ‘staffed with some winsome daughters of Rahab’? This incident is one of a hundred-odd entries listed under ‘Anecdotes’ in the index, which is clearly Dunn’s own loving work. He was ...”

“... model press has ended, with a reduction of consumer choice, and a squashing of heresies almost unknown in scale since the Inquisition. There is a second threat to freedom which needs to be considered, and which derives from the ‘moral majority’. There is nothing new about this either. In the old battle of the books the political and the moral ...”