“... justification for a strike led by attack helicopters on an arms dump in Mogadishu which left ‘an unknown number’ of Somalis dead. On closer inspection the incident revealed just the kind of queasy anomaly about Operation Restore Hope that saturation media coverage a week or two earlier had failed to expose. The weapons in the dump were impounded after the ...”

“... propelled into the big league.’ He delighted in a test for Oklahoma! made by Rod Steiger and the unknown James Dean (though Dean could not sing well enough to get the part): he has been very appreciative of Method acting. That is why Montgomery Clift played Private Prewitt – though not an obvious choice as a soldier or a boxer. (He ...”

“... to investigate the sexual revolution both collectively, through the testimony of these numerous unknown foot-soldiers, and individually, for their champion was a famously determined self-publicist and legitimator of her own desires. Disappointingly, however, we are once again given little more than the story of Stopes’s romantic, litigious and literary ...”

“... come back. After his death his wife completed two unfinished novels. His pottery remained almost unknown until, in 1952, the Victoria and Albert Museum held its Exhibition of Victorian and Edwardian Decorative Arts. There Morris, Burges, Ashbee, De Morgan and the rest of the handful for whom – Morris thought – the museum had been created in the first ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... their idols’ birthdays. Kris Wu, a major celebrity among Chinese millennials but virtually unknown to anyone else, suddenly swept to the top of the charts just before his birthday last year. It turned out that Wu’s fans had been preparing the coup for months; it’s called ‘slaughtering the charts’. They raised a huge fund to buy as many US ...”

“... oohs and aahs from visitors. Not least because the curators have plumped for poetry. They bow to unknown unknowns, declaring in the entrance lobby that the monument remains a ‘mystery’. An audio system immerses you in birds warbling and waters rushing as you turn into the first main gallery and are introduced to those hunter-gatherers who, from around ...”

“... like an ordinary local move . . . It seemed, to parents like mine, like a gigantic step into the unknown, away from all their familiar haunts, free of all that was troubling and dark. It was a step towards some sort of light, and such moves, even in small countries, can seem monumental. The moves seem monumental, but they are radically incomplete. Two ...”

“... is my spiritual home,’ Deedes thought as he accepted. The Daily Express called him ‘the most unknown minister of all time’. Although a journalist, Deedes was not ‘a slick or pushful chappie’, the paper said. ‘His column chronicling the daily doings of clubmen and canons was about as slick as a Victorian railway carriage . . . Mr Deedes is ...”

“... seamen, coolies, amahs, syces, green-eyed idols and fiendish poisons leached from tropical plants unknown to European science. At 11 I embarked on my first love affair, falling hopelessly for Kim. Never have I yearned so much to inhabit someone else’s skin as I did Kim’s. Even now, past sixty, I can catch him flitting through some dappled interior and ...”

“... were accepted by the Atlantic. In 1860, he was asked to write a campaign biography for the largely unknown Abraham Lincoln. Drawing on his own boyhood memories as well as the facts of Lincoln’s life, Howells made the story of a young man’s rise from the frontier into a mythic tale. With the money he earned from the Lincoln biography, Howells travelled to ...”

“... Perrault’s Bibliothèque Nationale. As Girouard carefully explains, Stirling had entered unknown territory at Cambridge. As at Leicester, the materials chosen were engineering bricks, tile, steel trusses and patent glazing – foreign to any traditional contractor. The timetable was very tight and the cost considerations stringent: conditions, you ...”

“... of any chance of peace for generations to come and the increase of bloodshed to dimensions unknown until now. We decided to prevent this disaster with the only resources at our disposal. The reception at the Mukatah was tumultuous. Dozens of TV teams from all over the world, especially the Arab world, were crowded in the courtyard, and pounced on ...”

“... a famous writer’s unguarded reactions or look over the shoulders of unnamed and otherwise unknown readers. Yet its theoretical argument moves in the opposite direction, countering earlier critics’ comfortable assumptions that marginalia are ‘spontaneous, impulsive, uninhibited; that they offer direct access to the reader’s mind; that they are ...”

“... 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 ...”