“... definition of ‘Homer’, pointing out that the issue or evidence in question would have been unknown to ‘him’. Of course, echoes of Gilgamesh may have affected Greek hexameter epic before the eighth century – but they are nevertheless relevant to our Iliad. Despite some obvious difficulties, Lane Fox is clearly right to combine pots and ...”

“... stretches to the horizon. He’s tied to a crystal chair and surrounded by robed men who speak an unknown language, until ‘an enormous eyelid began to slowly unstick from half the horizon and let a crescent of blinding light into the hall,’ and he finds himself inside the giant eyeball of an undefined higher being. Then the blind masseur says: I had been ...”

“... supplied with food for the support of the said animals.’ The final outcome of this wrangling is unknown: ‘the last page of the records has been destroyed by rats or bugs of some sort.’ Trials could be long-drawn-out affairs, in which lawyers would lay elaborate theological and metaphysical groundwork. The prosecuting attorney would first set out the ...”

“... me in on Friday … I’ll ring you soon or you ring me … please can you send me some more Unknown Pleasures badges cos Ive only 1 left.’ From Belgium: ‘Dear Joy Division, I write you stupidly but it’s a need … People are vulgar. I feel dispirit.’ And there’s a request from a girl in Leeds, written on jolly yellow notepaper, asking for ...”

“... narrative time, because under the emperors Roman politics ceases to change. There are pages on the unknown archaic king whose inscription (RECEI, an early spelling of rex) was discovered in 1899 under one of the earliest parts of the forum, and who proves that a regal period of Roman history is not purely imaginary; on Scipio Barbatus, consul of 298 BC, whose ...”

“... anything out. More is never enough. Fantastical nonsense, reaching out to grasp the astonishing unknown, does make a kind of sense for contemporary readers. As Angela Carter writes of her magus hero in ‘The Curious Room’, ‘He truly believed that nothing was unknowable. That is what makes him modern.’ Some of the tales are also concerned with ...”

“... elicit a brutal government crackdown and his former schoolmates disappear into jails or suffer unknown fates, Rasa realises that the words of the officials he is asked to translate are flagrant lies. Rather than be complicit, he decides he will misinterpret. ‘There is an art to misinterpreting,’ he reflects. It needs to be done subtly so that it ...”

“... with knowledge’, she adds, for ‘the other person is the personification of the other, the unknown, the external world, and all one’s craft is necessary to catch him.’ But if he will not be caught, as the ‘Sonnet’ says he won’t, then artifice is the anticipation of endless failure. Thinking of form as a device for rejecting the external world ...”

“... to demonising the enemy the approach seems to have been calibrated according to nation. Japan was unknown to most Europeans. So while detailed depictions of hand-to-hand fighting were generally avoided as more disturbing than encouraging, Allied soldiers bayoneting combatants over the slogan ‘Smash the Japs’ were thought to be effective. Japan could be ...”

“... is more work to be done. Brotton works sensitively with a range of sources, most of which will be unknown to the general reader, but the archive is far from exhausted. The history of the Levant Company in the 16th and early 17th century – and its diplomats, traders, interpreters, chancers and hangers-on – remains patchy and opaque. New, multilingual ...”

“... constant warfare, the phenomenon of women dressing as men to join the army or navy was far from unknown: scholars have identified a host of such cases in the British Empire. The Georgians felt delight and sometimes appalled fascination at what the historian Dror Wahrman has called the ‘protean mutability of identity’. If, as Fielding claimed in ...”

“... has travelled further than she could have imagined, and the location of many of her books is still unknown: 235 volumes have been identified so far, but more are being found all the time, thanks mainly to Wolfreston’s annotations.*The four-act life story of Wolfreston’s books – accumulation, stasis, scattering, reconstruction – is typical of many ...”

“... habitation, to disinter ancient remains, the protagonists are spooked both by the presence of unknown watchers and by the fear that the plane due to collect them at the end of summer will never turn up. The people in Summerwater also feel watched, if only by one another. And they’re cut off (although Glasgow is just an hour away), because there’s no ...”

“... as an ‘iconology of the interval’ and it is the empty spaces in the panels, filled with unknown and uncertain matter, that hold the images in constellations of thought. In the final three panels, the present day begins to intrude. An advertisement for body lotion in Panel 77 shows an airborne girl carrying a laurel wreath besides the words Sieg der ...”

“... Our understanding of women’s literary culture has also been expanded to include works by unknown authors that were written for a female audience. The Ancrene Wisse and the Middle English translation of The Doctrine of the Hert, guidebooks to the spiritual life composed for anchoresses and nuns respectively, may be thought of as women’s writing. But ...”