“... and the British Library didn’t acquire that name until the 1970s. The word ‘pub’ was as yet unknown even to the slangiest of English tongues, and so there was no basis for Anne’s supposition that it meant ‘café’. Sennett wisely does not risk a pastiche of Regency-Victorian prose style. His characters write well in their respective earnest ...”

“... been exterminated, that we were far beyond any hope of assistance, that even our whereabouts were unknown, I found wholly satisfying.’ Almost inevitably, Thesiger now became one of ‘the Blues who ruled the Blacks’ in the Sudan. In the Political Service, scornful of desk work, he was for ever on the trek, seizing every chance to shoot lion as the vermin ...”

“... his friends to cover huge distances on their Continental excursions to forgotten cathedrals and unknown libraries. Even his old school tutor H.E. Luxmoore was shocked by the frivolity of James and his circle. After spending Christmas at King’s one year, he complained: ‘O how the time goes in talk, talk, talk and overmuch eating.’ Last night Monty ...”

“... original is often experienced as multiple.’ For this reason he has chosen stories that are ‘as unknown as reasonably possible’. And yet the book is not finally frazzling; it is tamer than its prospectus promises. One of the reasons has to do with narrative, and we have already glimpsed it in the Borges essay. There is a lot of information in ...”

“... the end – which meant: ‘to discover or find out for oneself (something previously concealed or unknown, as a person’s true character, an undiscovered fact etc)’. The verb is now overwhelmingly associated with the Enlightenment activity of bringing something or someone ‘to a fuller or more advanced state’ – to ‘develop’ now ...”

“... behaviour seems inconsistent with Saul’s view of her. He gets off, as if in a reverie, with an unknown woman dressed as a nurse who seems to have wandered out of the Beatles’ ‘Penny Lane’ and reminds him of poppies, and when he mentions these on the phone while ordering a bouquet for Jennifer, it almost makes the florist cry. Describing Jack, a ...”

“... cell lines. As well as the obvious ones, they discovered a large number of genes with completely unknown functions that are nonetheless essential for cell survival. There’s still a lot of cell biology we not only don’t understand, but don’t know we don’t understand. Techniques using CRISPR-Cas9 to disrupt genes in cells that we can study in the lab ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to murder 77 Palestinian leaders, for alleged terrorist offences, past or future. A group of unknown Israeli intelligence operatives have the authority to decide on these assassinations, presumably with the approval on each occasion of the Israeli Cabinet and, more generally, that of the US. The helicopters have also done an efficient job of bombing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... What is common to all is the overwhelming realisation, until now overlooked by most men and unknown even to lots of women, that breasts are ever-present, continually noticeable, intimate signals that we all ignore at our peril. But we can all unite in voting that the worst culprit is not the ill-informed male, but the over-confident male doctor. There ...”

“... is necessarily read as a report: and for the great majority of Westerners, a report on a virtually unknown world. Judged by internal evidence, Stefan Heym’s Collin makes a strong impression of authenticity. It has been hailed in West Germany as the best available picture of the DDR and its history. Yet Heym continues to live in East Berlin. His earlier works ...”

“... In Feaver’s poem, the quizzical subject is contemplated with a corresponding detachment: an unknown person, matter for a story. ‘A Quiet Wedding’, Feaver’s other photograph-poem, is actually about not having photographs, so that the poem sets out to supply them: scenes a camera might have caught, but actually re-imaginings in an essentially ...”