“... locally recruited, are included, the conservative estimate is 130,000. This figure excludes the unknown number of members of the Wehrmacht who killed Jews; a reading of Omer Bartov’s book suggests that the majority at one time or another, for one reason or another (or without any reason at all), did: just as there were millions of individual deaths, so ...”

“... he was also changed by what he suffered. On a transforming voyage, a journey into the fearsome unknown, he was shaken by contact, in heightened perceptions and aroused emotions, with environments previously unexperienced or unrecorded. From Grafton – for all his skill as a pen-portraitist – the reader could never guess how Las Casas was warped by his ...”

“... had intended to be ‘a new Deutschland, where synagogues shall be forbidden, and Bourses unknown’, as the Times put it. What Macintyre found was a remnant, poorer than their grandparents had been in the economic depression in Saxony itself in the 1880s, people who had never learnt, Schubert explained, to manage the soil or raise animals for the ...”

“... remain. So do at least some of the mentalities, including ‘an easy-going sociability that is unknown in the West,’ as Darnton puts it. Time, as I can confirm, is not yet an object in those parts. But, for better or worse, East Europeans are trying to pick up where they left off before Communism intervened. For better in Leningrad, where at least the ...”

“... to the contrary, he had rare access to all levels of society, and had choices that were unknown to most Australians. Whether in the bush or at Cambridge, White had time and means to ‘find himself’, mixing with the bright and powerful, belonging to a class which gave him some measure of sexual society that he would have been unlikely to find as ...”

“... Both Danton and his adversaries frequent brothels and talk luridly of venereal disease. Unknown to the incorruptible Robespierre, one of his associates, suffering from tabes dorsalis, is told that his mistress will pull out his shrivelled spinal cord and dangle it down his back like a pigtail; another’s skin is adorned with ‘rosaries’, a ...”

“... upwards and onwards to the dignity of a Nation. Victorians, Queenslanders, or Westralians will be unknown, and every child born of the soil, or approved and naturalised colonist, will in future be an Australian. An Australian; a citizen of a nation whose realm is a continent and whose destiny is – what? ...    Australia has ever been an exemplar to the ...”

“... in-laws. After his death, when Shaw was at university, ‘he left a litany of other lives, each unknown to the other.’ Joking that had she spent more time with her father she might have become a more skilful liar, Shaw says: ‘I’ve always wished I could tell better lies, not thinking of myself as someone very good at it’ – but what a strange thing ...”

“... tobacco, turkeys) while others (turnips, hops, rape, madder, flax, hemp, woad) were not unknown in this country but were launched, or re-launched, as farmers got to hear of their successful cultivation in the Low Countries and the Rhineland, where they had been established since the early 15th century. The account of the people concerned, and the ...”

“... star helps to incite spectacular musical innovations and barroom brawls – all of them entirely unknown to his mourning fans. In the end, this story turns out to be the narrator’s fantasy, the invention of a 57-year-old retail store manager who yearns to tell ‘all kinds of stories, stories based on real stories, stories of the most rigorous ...”

“... in rhythm with all the others. Studies by him of life – the world outside the studio – are unknown. There are, it is true, very few Renaissance drawings in this category but, although Correggio’s subjects were higher beings, his depictions of the Virgin and Child, of Venus and Cupid and of infant angels must have been based on observation in the ...”

“... the nationalist Indonesian leader who was willing to work with the PKI. But Curtis is all but unknown as the final act of the violence we helped to create is played out. His findings are damning. On 5 October 1965, as the massacres began, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, Britain’s Ambassador in Jakarta, told the Foreign Office: ‘I have never concealed from you ...”

“... in the things that really mattered, it was hard to fault. The 111 helpline was responsive, and the unknown clinician who insisted I go to hospital saved me from something much worse. The ambulance came quickly and the paramedics behaved with the reticent chivalry of medieval knights. Despite the carousel of doctors and nurses, the medical direction was ...”

“... novel. Such a claim does justice neither to the subject of this book nor to the numerous unknown people who have doubtless struggled, more or less successfully, to ‘mother’ themselves. The novelist’s greatest creative act, it need hardly be said, was the writing of her novels.What disappears almost entirely from this book is Wharton’s ...”

“... as vulgar or childish, lower order, even irresponsible. We must remember that the past is more unknown than known, that the vast majority of lived experience is penetrable only to the guided imagination. If we pursue the dead, it is because they have left so many clues behind, and because we can’t help being curious as to what they looked like before ...”