“... sites, as hungry humans push slash-and-burn agriculture ever closer to jungles seething with unknown butterflies. They tell us boys’ own tales of butterfly-chasing in South America – torrential rains, mudslides, sinister border guards. They try to persuade us that lepidoptery is the flagship of entomology (I prefer beetles). They flex their literary ...”

“... Sachs partner and hedge fund manager whom Trump wants in charge of the Treasury, is largely unknown and has never worked in government.In addition to the 15 cabinet members, more than a thousand other presidential appointments require Senate confirmation. They include US marshals and US attorneys; a deputy secretary, a couple of dozen under-secretaries ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... scope. Every explosion of social forces, instead of being dissipated in a surrounding circuit of unknown space and barbaric chaos, will be sharply re-echoed from the far side of the globe.’ Perhaps no less important for the pursuit of power were revolutionary changes in the quality and quantity of information people had about the world. At the end of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... but despite the variety of ingredients found in pills sold as Ecstasy, killer pills are virtually unknown. Very occasionally an individual can react badly to the drug, but dehydration, overheating or excessive/compulsive water drinking are the most common causes of death. Around two million people are using the drug, if only occasionally, and there were 43 ...”

“... quite brilliantly. This hugely readable slice of history seen ‘from underneath’ tells an unknown victim’s tale, rather as a generation ago George Rudé presented the French Revolution ‘from below’ by giving the perspective of the lower classes. Her detective work is superb, the social background vividly sketched, and the sorrow and the cruelty ...”

“... against the galley wall. There was no question now but that we would be taken off. In fact, unknown to us, a helicopter had been despatched from Stornoway and was heading over the Minch. However, we were asked again if we wanted to leave, and again we chorused no. By that point, though, I was ready to demur. The deck-sliding business had been ...”

“... years of continuity gave way to significant change in the 1880s. The death in London of the as yet unknown Dr Marx, and the birth of Keynes and Attlee, together with the publication of J.R. Seeley’s Expansion of England – all within the first six months of 1883 – are useful reminders of how the old world was giving way to the new. But was it really the ...”

“... on, and with increasing self-assurance. Travel was part of the solution: traversing the hitherto unknown world, he says, he learned to look in his own way. But he had first to deal with a known world: Trinidad, and his family, with its rather withered Hinduism. He left it all behind, not without a sense of guilt, for when he should have gone back to help his ...”

“... Dumbo had a deeply conservative moral: ‘Young Dumbo, instead of flying off towards some unknown paradise, chooses wealth and security and so ends as the highly paid star of the same circus director who once flogged his mother.’ Kracauer was more generous towards Fantasia, which he found experimental in its attempt to invent a graphic language for ...”

“... the news, again and again, until the magician is undone and the children are depressed. Jacobs, unknown to himself, has clearly spent his life yearning to be the magician he can only shout down. Thanks to George, or ‘Spook’, as his racist boss liked to call him, Sinatra’s life of sunning and sinning has a few new details, which will serve for some ...”

“... savagely the lightest affront, to live to a hundred full of years and honour, to die young and unknown but recognised the following day as the most neglected genius of the age. A fondness for playing roles ran in the family. His father, John Ross, tall, good-looking and a bit of a dandy, spent twenty years failing to complete a Life of Napoleon. More ...”

“... change occurred even in this state that so prided itself on stability – fated to remain for ever unknown? One possible solution to the problem is to shift the balance towards archaeological rather than literary sources. The mirage constructs for us a bleak and austere Sparta, in contrast to Athens, epitome of the ‘glory that was Greece’. Pomeroy points ...”