“... 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 ...”

“... 2001, the Sanders portrait must be one of the most famous likenesses in the world of a completely unknown Elizabethan. By contrast, the second portrait has languished in obscurity, though its provenance is a good deal more picturesque and its connections with the name of Shakespeare are in one respect at least rather more verifiable. It depicts a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by Erik the Red just over a thousand years ago when he ventured west of Iceland and discovered an unknown coast. His son Leif went for education to Norway and disgusted Erik by bringing back the Christian religion. Later Leif, like his father, set off westwards and founded a short-lived settlement on an even more distant shore where trees ...”

“... and Petrarch with Sophia. Whether she knew she was pregnant before Foscolo returned to Italy is unknown, but they never met again. In due course the Hamiltons were released and the child was born. Foscolo never had another. Back in Milan, he began Dei sepolcri. Above all it is a political and patriotic poem. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, how to ...”

“... briefly through the debris of a dead but unburied past towards a sudden but expected end and an unknown future. For our parents it promised only an unrecoverable past, while we dreamed of great tomorrows; my ‘Aryan’ schoolmates in the form of a national rebirth, Communists like myself, as the universal revolution initiated in October 1917. Even its few ...”

“... but the pleasure craft whose masts now bristle and clink in the marinas around the harbour were unknown. Portsmouth certainly meant the dockyard (not yet ‘historic’), the city’s main employer until the 1970s. My father’s last job before retirement was as a fitter for Hampshire Engineering, a small maintenance firm contracted to the naval ...”

“... of unpublished papyri, and you never know what you may find . . . Your new papyrus may offer you unknown Greek poetry; it may offer unique evidence for the inflation of donkey prices at the height of the Roman Empire.’ City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish is driven by Parsons’s own irrepressible pleasure in the discovery of the details of individual lives in ...”

“... and arson in dockyards or arsenals. Whatever its object, the 1823 Act must have resulted in an unknown number of accused persons who had been convicted of capital offences, treason among them, being discharged instead of hanged. Maurice Healy’s classic volume of gossip, The Old Munster Circuit, contains what may have been a residual misapplication of the ...”

“... Most victims were killed in cold blood, either during the civil war or in the decades after it. An unknown number of executions were carried out in secret, the deaths unregistered, burial sites unmapped. Others were documented: the archives of the Third Territorial Military Tribunal of Barcelona recorded that Sancho, Mohino and two other men were arrested as ...”