“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... fall of Amin in 1979; the forests by the side of the road to Kampala saw countless executions of unknown men by the thugs of Amin’s State Research Bureau – once omnipresent in their dark glasses and sharp suits. Now the young soldiers at the rare roadblocks are the products of a very different military culture: during the war that brought this regime to ...”

“... who present them are all men and women who possess the kind of informed knowledge and experience unknown to our present dilettante ruling class. Much of what they propose, furthermore, is unquestionable: no one can contemplate the last twenty years of our history without instinctively assenting to it. Whether a hypothetical progressive government should ...”

“... to a child of ten. (I was six weeks older.) But I couldn’t get across the notion of x as an unknown, because he knew, stubborn little kabbalist, that x was 24. He would have burned me at the stake if he’d been allowed to play with matches. In traditional cosmology, the math stays simple, but may be elaborate. Yin and yang are the archetypes of every ...”

“... volatile nature of things before they congeal, of the tenuousness and vulnerability of all things, unknown to those with a common binary vision who saw the world of a piece, with a seamless skin like the skin of a sausage holding things together. My right eye removed the skin of the visible world.’ The imagery of excoriation is also appropriate to Audrey’s ...”

“... there’s a something in this breast’), he breaks out of his stale existence and makes for the unknown satisfactions of the West. Against all expectations, including his own, it looks as though he might succeed. The last story, ‘The Management of Grief’, shows how the bereavements of our dissonant world can create room for opportunities, albeit bleak ...”

“... for the crime, that I had a dreadful guilty secret that I would henceforth carry with me unknown to myself for thirty years.’ It is, or so Allon came to believe, this secret – whatever it stood for, whatever crouched behind it – that would have found a way, one day, of writing itself, in defiance of the distance that writing was meant to ...”

“... one believes, as a previous generation of critics did, that she must have been in love with some unknown man or woman. Emily’s passion was all inside. Katherine Frank has produced a highly readable study, more about the Brontës than about Emily specifically, which also makes some original suggestions. Did Emily suffer from what would now be called ...”

“... heartless, and also a little stupid, to weigh a literary biography by its poundage of previously unknown embarrassments, affairs or tragedies. In biography, that most voyeuristic of genres, what counts is sympathy and discretion – qualities Boyd displays in abundance – as well as modesty. By admitting that no amount of knowing about the life can explain ...”