“... Duffy is nothing if not prolific, but until relatively late in her career Miss Behrens was unknown outside Cambridge. There she had the reputation of a sharp lecturer and scourge of doctoral dissertations and unpublished manuscripts. These critical qualities made her scholarly name overnight in 1963 when she deployed them in a brilliant article on ...”

“... have been reportage, leavened with anguished comment, rather than reviews: At a time and place unknown, at a secret trial conducted by anonymous judges and prosecutors, Nagy and three of his associates were condemned to death. The world learned of the trial, the verdict and the executions from one brief announcement on 17 June 1958. No bodies were handed ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight. A bony, pre-pubescent, nude girl (a subject quite unknown to Classical art) sleeps in a feverish attitude upon a bed of snow which floats upon a glassy block of pale-green banded onyx. The tight and silky surface of the skin is contrasted with the soft powdery texture of the snow, which is itself ...”

“... young man, his eyes fixed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown.’ This is the slide which Bishop effected in ‘The Fish’, in which density of description, a meticulous anatomising which builds as it strips, becomes an acknowledgment of strangeness and of fellowship. There is, Bishop wrote, no division between the ...”

“... Karl, an architect and alderman of German stock. Karl’s origin causes problems which were not unknown, at the period in question, to the present diarist, who was fairly far, however, from ever being taken for an enemy spy, and who did not take himself to have been cleft, as Richard is, by the embarrassments of a semi-enemy name. But I still resented the ...”

“... festival at Edacochin and watched the actors play out the ritual struggle of good against evil. Unknown to us as we walked home that night along the sandy paths to the Edacochin boatyard, Jim Howard, Jyl Gocher and a number of Indian thugs were waiting for us in the boatyard.’ Soon afterwards they were assured by an Indian customs official that ‘this ...”

“... them, the Review had most of the things I’d want a little magazine to have: it had a group of unknown poets it admired, it had a ‘kind of poem’ it wanted to promote, and it had powerfully placed enemies it was eager to attack. It had youth, it had a sense of humour, and – looking back on it from now – a bumptious kind of certainty that it knew all ...”

“... pretends. Although his surviving family halfheartedly claimed that Thyrza must have been an unknown young woman who died in 1811, E.H. Coleridge established beyond doubt that the poems were written in memory of John Edleston, a 15-year-old Trinity choirboy with whom Byron fell in love in October 1805. And Marchand has subsequently fleshed out the ...”

“... warriors; during the 1970s, female explorers, daring their way two by two through the harsh unknown. Then and now, there are also would-be male allies ultimately left behind: in Midnight Salvage (1999) a real young man in a wheelchair whom Rich dated in college; in Tonight, an imaginary friend from Rich’s childhood with the unlikely name Axel ...”

“... observes of his decision: ‘At the end of the Seven Years’ War, French diplomats treated the unknown as expendable.’ The picture that emerges from The Elusive West is one of three great powers – Britain, France and Spain – blundering their way through the American fog, tripping over obstacles they failed to see and imagining dangers that did not ...”

“... that led up to them. Increasingly large societies of unrelated individuals who are entirely unknown to one another are now held together not only by innate predispositions to co-operation, channelled by imitation and learning into different cultural forms, but also by social institutions that give small numbers of individuals power to control the ...”

“... people who mock such women, because such women are not to be mocked. ‘Of hasty tone/with dames unknown/I ought to be more chary,’ says a chastened Lord Chancellor in Iolanthe: It seems that she’s a fairy From Andersen’s librāry And I took her for The proprietor Of a ladies’ semināry! The Fairy Queen and other Gilbertian women of a certain age ...”

“... of de Mohrenschildt’s? Just some guy on the street, or a co-conspirator? Maybe even the famous Unknown Shooter who – according to the conspiracy theorists – had been lurking on the grassy knoll near Dealey Plaza when Kennedy’s motorcade approached? I told myself that was crazy, but it was impossible to know for sure. Worse still is the sight of de ...”

“... morals’ as well as conspiring ‘to solicit, induce, procure and endeavour to persuade persons unknown to commit buggery’. The court, however, was longer on words than on evidence. There were also clear indications of spying, bribery, collusion, police corruption and political interference. The treasury solicitor, it emerged, had taken personal charge of ...”