“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... English, and indeed, despite his quickly achieved yet continuing fame in France, he is almost unknown here. In the opening pages of Artificial Snow, the narrator misses the last métro, just as he is left behind by life. (The novel is full of trains and buses that abandon the narrator – if they turn up at all.) He has just left a dinner party hosted by ...”

“... in the play’. Although Irving’s butchery of Shakespeare’s texts is reprehensible, it’s not unknown today: Peter Brook is not the only contemporary director to follow Irving in cutting Fortinbras from Hamlet. And his critique of the emergent naturalism of the early 20th century has contemporary echoes too. As Holroyd-as-Irving puts it: ‘This new style ...”

“... the early Baath Arab Socialist Party. In the present free-for-all that is the Iraqi economy, with unknown sums being siphoned off from the state budget and huge subventions coming from US, Iranian and other sources, those who have inserted themselves into the government on the basis that they are communal leaders have a great deal to lose if the ground rules ...”

“... France. Payments by one state to ensure an alliance with or the neutrality of another were not unknown in this period and backhand payments made by foreign lobbyists to government ministers were commonplace. Charles II’s foreign policy was certainly unprincipled (as was everyone else’s: both Charles I and Cromwell explored realistic opportunities to ...”

“... person – attempts to perform itself. On the other hand, Lodge hasn’t taken a leap into the unknown. Just as Messenger was a version of the theoretically inclined American academic Morris Zapp, first seen in Changing Places, so Bates is the latest avatar of Philip Swallow, Zapp’s English foil: fussy, well-meaning, vain, hypocritical about sex, unable ...”

“... smoke-filled churches mistook them for apparitions. Reductive explanations of this sort were not unknown even in the Middle Ages. Theologians and ecclesiastical authorities were aware that some miraculous hosts had mould on them; church lawyers ferreted out cases of feigned sanctity and fraudulent miracles; contemplatives wrote with great sophistication ...”

“... crucially, had access to data from weather ships further out in the western Atlantic.* Another unknown, or hardly known, is Captain Scott-Bowden, who reconnoitred Omaha Beach by midget submarine under the nose of German sentries, and on his return to London warned his superiors that there were bound to be tremendous casualties: the beach, he said, was ‘a ...”

“... Davison, advanced the ‘other woman thesis’ – that some of the letters were written by an unknown spurned lover of Bothwell’s – which has influenced a number of subsequent biographies of Mary. Guy has justifiably rejected it and effectively returned to Hosack’s Darnley thesis. But he can’t explain how the letters to Darnley were obtained ...”