“... the wartime coup had prompted Montagu to come out first with his authorised version, published The Unknown Courier. So the tale has been told before, but Ben Macintyre has done a more thorough and readable job of it than his predecessors. His access to the classified documents and unpublished autobiography that Montagu, who died in 1985, left to his son Jeremy ...”

“... diminish his eventual utility on the labour market. Might there just be some atavistic human urge, unknown to economists, to stay alive and if possible ...”

“... certainly isn’t coy. It follows wise but ugly Ludwig Holly and beautiful but slow Leo Vincey to unknown lands on the east coast of Africa. Leo’s dying father bequeaths him a potsherd on which is written in Greek a family history showing that Leo is descended from the royal house of pharaohs, and an instruction that he seek out a beautiful white sorceress ...”

“... faster over time. The effects of that accelerated expansion can be measured, but the cause remains unknown. Physicists’ first thought was that dark energy arose as some quantum mechanical effect, perhaps related to the unavoidable jiggling of matter as governed by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. But when they tried to calculate the amount of dark ...”

“... as if these people are looking for much improvement or change in their lives. Faced with the unknown, they are more likely to retreat than found a start-up. They need looking after. This means that the necessities of life – health, energy, housing – must remain affordable, and threats must be kept at bay. The role of the state is not to initiate or ...”

“... and familiar. Felski quotes Judith Butler as denigrating the familiar in contrast to the other or unknown, a standard postmodern move; but one continues to hope in one’s churlish, outmoded way that the species will remain unfamiliar with global nuclear war, while recalling that the familiar for some people involves teaching disabled children and organising ...”

“... illustrates how far our political standards have evolved since the 1970s.) Violence isn’t unknown in American political history. The 19th century saw fistfights in Congress and riots at election time in major American cities. Until well into the 20th century, Southern blacks who wanted to exercise the right to vote faced violent retribution from the ...”

“... of the Rakhine State Peace, Stability and Development Committee. Its purpose and powers are unknown, but it’s unlikely that the ANP will agree to any proposal to ameliorate the Muslims’ position, given that, according to its secretary, U Tun Aung Kyaw, it ‘cannot accept the name “Rohingya”’. The reaction was the same after Suu Kyi asked the ...”

“... for a liver transplant, I read in one of the obits. She’d been living for decades with an unknown virus, only identified in the late 1980s as hepatitis C. In 1993, I remember, Liz had pressed her proof copy of Trainspotting on me. She recognised immediately that it was ‘a show-stopper’, and when I read it, I agreed. I’d read one of the stories ...”

“... table, intended to aid identification. Assuming, for instance, that you were faced with an unknown ‘land-fowl’, the first question to consider would be whether its beak was ‘crooked’ or ‘streight’; then, if straight, was the fowl large, medium or small in size? If medium, was its beak strong and thick, or short and small? Through this ...”

“... have no Phoenician literature from the first millennium BC – though, as the number of previously unknown texts discovered on papyrus over the last century should remind us, an absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence.As In Search of the Phoenicians pulls down one edifice, it reveals another: the idea of Phoenicia was largely an invention of ...”

“... dining with Ivan the Terrible, drinking from a cup he valued at £400. Jenkinson’s itch for the unknown – his maps of Russia teem with curiosities – meant he was keen to extend the company’s operations into Persia. The court magus John Dee supplied him with ingenious clocks and compasses – Dee was credited with being the first to use the term ...”

“... This hue, which works on the colour receptor in my brain, is impervious to simulation. It is unknown both to Pantone (though it isn’t that far from 18-4537) and to the British Colour Council’s 1951 chart, which included ‘Nigger Brown’. An RGB toy on my computer fails to conjure a plausible likeness: all it can manage is an approximation ...”

“... and also from the strange, large painting called The Paston Treasure. Its date and artist are unknown but it was almost certainly painted around the time of William’s death in 1663 and commissioned either by him or his son Robert. Having existed in obscurity for centuries (on its donation to Norwich Castle Museum, the last owner warned: ‘the painting ...”

“... of place in Doniger’s treatment of the sexual aspect of Hinduism because of something largely unknown, its typology of same-sex behaviour. The Kāmasūtra is almost unique in Sanskrit literature both in dealing with the subject in any detail, and in its relatively neutral presentation. The subject receives hardly any mention in treatises on dharma, but in ...”