“... works of public art currently inaccessible to locals: the flying shield of the Monument to the Unknown Soldier, completed in 1982; and the Victory Arch, completed in 1989 to celebrate the ‘triumph’ over Iran – a gargantuan replica of Saddam’s fists, in which he holds crossed swords that rise to an apex of forty metres above the entrance to ...”

“... to be within genes. They were almost all found in parts of the genome whose function, if any, was unknown. Our genes make up only about 2 per cent of our DNA. Together with another 8 per cent or so of the genome, they encode important biological functions. The other 90 per cent is junk DNA (that’s the proper term). It doesn’t do anything bad – the ...”

“... to discover/uncover the film’s rhythmic structure’. His thrill is the pursuit of the unknown: ‘In spite of the technical wizardry that surrounds us in the 21st century, working on a film is the closest many of us will ever come to signing on with the crew of a 16th-century galleon, sailing halfway around the world across unmapped seas.’If ...”

“... He memorably misassigned her to the journal’s theatre column, the post that had been held by an unknown Mary McCarthy in the late 1930s. In the diaries Sontag zaps McCarthy’s ‘low-fashion red+blue print suit’ and ‘clubwoman gossip’. An old story has it that when McCarthy met Sontag she sized her up with the cutting, ‘Oh, you’re the imitation ...”

“... claim, teasingly publicised over the previous months, that his play was based on a hitherto unknown work by Shakespeare. ‘It is my good fortune to retrieve this remnant of his pen from obscurity,’ he says with studied modesty. He calls it ‘this orphan play’, and ‘this dear relick’. On the title page Double Falsehood is described as ‘A Play ...”

“... It offers alternative versions of well-loved songs and, more occasionally, pristine versions of unknown songs. (It should be noted that these are official releases, so the use of the word ‘bootleg’ is inaccurate or at least ironic: the ‘true’ – i.e. illegal – Dylan bootlegs are another story.) The Cutting Edge takes us straight into the ...”

“... Shakspere’ was baptised at Holy Trinity Church on 26 April 1564. The actual date of his birth is unknown. The convention that it was 23 April, St George’s Day, is a wishful synchronicity first mooted in the 18th century; Thomas De Quincey’s counter-suggestion, that the date chosen for his granddaughter’s wedding – 22 April – commemorated his ...”

“... his talk of ‘my country’, he knows, as does his narrator, that ‘the artist is a native of an unknown country’ and that, for all the corresponding talk of buildings, cathedrals and ‘foundations’, his book is like those of Bergotte, irritatedly described by that super-patriot, Norpois, as having ‘no foundation’ (and as ‘altogether lacking in ...”

“... will know that the Persian Man ruled in Egypt’, but even this was withdrawn to the centre at an unknown date for unknown reasons – statues are like chess pieces in the ancient Near East, full of power and significance, always being kidnapped, rescued and triumphantly returned. Perhaps the profligate stone-chiselling ...”

“... in the West over the last century have been benign and healing. The body of what became the Unknown Soldier was exhumed from the sticky mud of Flanders, transported along with bags of surrounding dirt to a Quonset hut, where he was chosen by a blindfolded brigadier from several similarly exhumed bodies and shipped by train to the Channel. There, his ...”

“... the ruins of the annihilated city,’ she wrote in a newspaper article, ‘a new guest arrives, unknown, never seen before – the human being.’ It was, for Luxemburg, the revenge of the earth against the tyrannies and abuses of the world. She had nothing but contempt for the statesmen who were rushing to commiserate hot from the ravages of empire and the ...”

“... only at the very margins of the noteworthy, depending on mere inadvertence to keep its secrets unknown. Stories about seers sometimes make it sound as if animals talk to them, but most often that is probably shorthand for an expert reading of animal placements in and movements across the ouija board of the world, just as closely watched sacrifices might be ...”

“... women including Christiane Rochefort and Monique Wittig attempted to lay a floral sheaf for the unknown soldier’s wife at the Arc de Triomphe. Their bedsheet and bamboo banners read: ‘Il y a plus inconnu que le soldat inconnu, sa femme’ (‘more unknown than the Unknown Soldier is ...”

“... truth dawns on you, and the effect, itself rather like stealing into a theatre in the middle of an unknown play, is one of interpretation, of imaginative collaboration, of sign-reading and supposition: though with a novel we have the luxury of immediately rereading, and seeing how Firbank’s apparently unnaturalistic technique also crystallises something ...”

“... beyond the frontier, the trader brought many other things: stories of the exotic, knowledge of the unknown, foreign songs and dress, religion, disease, inventions and slaves. As a kind of confraternity that straddles the ages and the globe, such merchants can be castigated as greedy or lionised as adventurers. By virtue of their cross-pollination of cultures ...”