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“... than at a real peach? Why would we (at least sometimes) rather look at a Velázquez portrait of an unknown, very plain person than at a real, pretty human being? And why at a Chardin or a Velázquez rather than paintings of the same subjects by other painters? Reading Baxandall’s book puts up hares of this sort, and suggests ways to chase them by emphasising ...”

“... as in Alice in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz, the girl sleuth’s quest ‘is not really for the unknown, but for the known, the familiar’, or perhaps the familiar romanticised. I, too, loved series fiction as a girl, but Nancy Drew was never high on my list, and The Clue of the Leaning Chimney, which I have just reread, strikes me as unspeakably dull. My ...”

“... another word, and Adams proceeded to lodge a suit for defamation of character against persons unknown. End of story-one familiar to anyone who ever suffered such treatment during the Cold War and its colonial-style equivalent. I can remember receiving treatment of this kind in the Fifties. It makes one tired, and then it makes one angry. It made Jaabe So ...”

“... St John in the Uffizi, and in at least twenty other paintings of the Cinquecento – ‘a gesture unknown to devotional art before or since’, and later deplored. Steinberg has a long and brilliant excursus on bowdlerism, the practice of eliminating or toning down such gestures for the sake of decency (and for other reasons no less reprehensible), citing ...”

“... The alternative was to let the French return, and then wait to be granted their freedom at some ...”

“... only a little more than a decade to grip Macedonia by the throat. Yet it had been virtually unknown before then. Attempts by historians to account for the decisive role played by external forces and Great Power politics in this period have been patchy – which in part explains why research on Macedonian history now appears to be dominated by ...”

“... she is quite prepared to share both these feelings with her husband, then in Australia, and – unknown to his wife – himself on the verge of an entanglement with a young Scottish girl, by whom he was to have a child. ‘Now goodbye for the present dear Ganner,’ she concludes the letter, using her pet name for her husband. ‘What would you do with such ...”

“... from the men’s handkerchief counter in a department store, the governess, who represents the unknown future. With her ‘pale broad, patient, dreaming Russian face’, she brings order and calm back to the house: the children love her, and, inevitably, Frank finds himself desperately attracted to her. But she’s something else as well. The bitchy ...”

“... his is being safely kept in King’s College Library awaiting some mid-21st-century biographer of unknown sympathy (‘It was in 1970 that the young Motion’s shameless careerism first became apparent. On this occasion, however, his blandishments went unanswered, and many blamed him for the death of E.M. Forster’). When I first read of the octogenarian ...”

“... the model to which GUM, the grim all-purpose store in Moscow, is an approximation. Servants are as unknown as money. You wash clothes at public laundries. You eat at public restaurants. In 19th-century America (and, come to that, today), the height of luxury was to have an awning from the front door to the kerb. In Dr Leete’s Boston, such awnings spring out ...”

“... are familiar from Chapman’s The Celts: The Construction of a Myth (1992), as well as from works unknown to James such as Terence Brown’s Celticism (1996), but James gives them a new polemical slant. The facts, as opposed to the interpretation, seem to be as follows. Classical writers from the time of Herodotus referred to ‘Celts’ in Western and ...”

“... such a peculiar institution as King’s it is not to be supposed that O.B. imported a hitherto unknown degree of eccentricity. He had well-entrenched rivals from the start. For example, there was J.E. Nixon, who figures in Mr Anstruther’s narrative only as a college official disposed to make heavy weather over O.B.’s having given a tip to a ...”

“... there is something rather comic in Pitt and Robespierre scaring each other as beings of a new and unknown species, like Papageno and Monostatos. As he himself admits at the outset, Ehrman has an almost impossible task. ‘The central volume of a biography, it has been said, should be the keystone of an arch.’ Unfortunately, Pitt’s arch sags badly in the ...”

“... of bringing the author’s sources, and to some extent their credibility, onto the page. It is not unknown for the serried forces of three-digit footnote references that parade past the eye in scholarly books to conceal uncritically treated, if assiduously accumulated, materials. Mr Williams is good, for instance, on J.S. Mill as an authority on Lewes’s ...”

“... as well. This is not to belittle the learning of some of Bede’s contemporaries, known and unknown – men to whom Wormald does full justice – but the fact remains that their main value to the historian of the seventh and early eighth centuries is the contrasting light they throw on the vast structure erected by Bede. It requires an effort not to see ...”