“... in a space with more than four dimensions, but whether the original conjecture is true remains unknown. If the matter were settled, the solution could have implications for the design and manufacture of various electronic devices. There is less that can usefully be said at this level about the four remaining problems. One is concerned with a theory that ...”

“... in the same direction. Half the Tories’ annual conference platform used to be filled with the unknown faces of national association officials; not any more. At Labour conferences, motions binding the party leadership were voted by blocs of union delegates seated, often rowdily, in various parts of the hall. This has been swept away. Parties are no longer ...”

“... present tense, structured in what feels like a headlong rush away: anywhere, elsewhere, towards an unknown America. In a finely managed surprise in the last sentences, however, the girl’s destination turns out to be somewhere closer at hand. ‘When you find it, there is hardly anyone there but you know this is the place.’ All along she has only been ...”

“... state farms, strategic hamlets or ujamaa villages was frightful and the number of victims is still unknown. Being opposed to ‘progress’, whether it was the grands projets of the colonisers or the collectivist fantasies of the new elites, was dangerous and usually deadly. In this respect the similarity between the colonial administrations and the successor ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”