“... mountain and swamp, fearsome to behold even from the air. But Livingstone’s country had not been unknown to the Portuguese, established on both east and west coast for centuries. The term ‘explorer’ really needs to be dropped in favour of ‘traveller’, except when uninhabited tracts such as Antarctica are referred to. Cook was a genuine explorer when ...”

“... more from Italian and French. Ashenden says that ‘posterity makes its choice not from among the unknown writers of a period, but from among the known’; and here too Maugham must have felt he was on the right track. He was the most highly paid writer of his day. During the 1950s he appeared on cinema screens, cigarette in hand, introducing adaptations of ...”

“... Clare, who came from Helpston, a village near their own. Our investigation drew many previously unknown Hadmans from the ground where they had lain, undisturbed, for hundreds of years. They were known to each other, some of them, but unknown to us: lives summarised by uncertain dates and incompetent transcriptions of that ...”

“... protested against,’ he wrote in the year of Emma’s death,is the mixing of fact and fiction in unknown proportions. Infinite mischief would lie in that. If any statements in the dress of fiction are covertly hinted to be fact, all must be fact, and nothing else but fact, for obvious reasons. The power of getting lies believed about people through that ...”

“... display the writer’s eerie ability to enter another life, to appropriate a distant, apparently unknown landscape. Such letters make us revise our notions of the boundary between the known and the unknown, between poetry and life; merging that landscape’s natural, cultural and emotional features into one, the ...”

“... added that ‘the exact degree of intimacy between Frost and Kathleen Morrison at that point is unknown, although there has been, as is to be expected, rumour and conjecture.’ And he had quoted Frost’s 1939 comment after a visit to the Morrisons: ‘I came through the two weeks with the Morrisons pretty well considering all there was on all sides to ...”

“... McFarlane was one of the most influential medieval historians of postwar Britain, but his name is unknown outside academic circles. This would have pleased him. He grew up in Dulwich, the son of a civil servant in the Admiralty. A day boy at Dulwich College, he won an open scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford and then a senior demyship at Magdalen where in ...”

“... really object when he says that Een Ligt – though suppressed so effectively that it was almost unknown till the 20th century – was ‘one of the first and, by any reckoning, one of the most far-reaching texts of the European Radical Enlightenment’. No one would have recognised the idea of ‘European Radical Enlightenment’ at the time, after all, so ...”

“... began to be infected, hepatitis C hadn’t even been named, and HIV/Aids was entirely unknown; new protocols were introduced once the dangers became clear. According to Margaret Thatcher, ‘all patients received the best treatment available in light of the medical knowledge at the time.’ These claims were not true.In​ 1970, Richard Titmuss ...”

“... ill, and some are dying, from a new illness that is not Covid-19 but is connected to it in an unknown way. Besides severe respiratory conditions, the virus is also causing strokes in otherwise healthy, low-risk adults and permanent organ damage in some who have recovered.Eighty-two per cent of Americans believe in God. Sixty-two per cent of them believe ...”

“... came drugs. It seemed to Stone that among the writers he saw, a ragged mix of big names and the unknown, everybody was a user or a dealer. On Perry Lane, drugs had been a form of recreation; in Saigon their sale and consumption was of a different order of magnitude.Stone’s dozen days in Saigon were all passed in the shadow of the war. Everybody was in ...”

“... is precisely the scope of the word, and we cannot pretend that any place on the spectrum is really unknown to us. Many of the cases Kafka encounters in his work tell just this story: the large posters listing safety regulations but used only to replace broken windows; the lift that a rooming-house owner (who doesn’t want to pay the premium for the insurance ...”

“... along the faultlines of class: goods that became mainstays of middle-class life remained all but unknown further down the social scale. Indeed, the spread in home ownership probably did as much to accentuate as abate class feeling, as better-off families migrated to leafy suburbs away from urban smells and noise. Working-class women entered those suburban ...”

“... in a cat-and-mouse game with his colleagues and readers, Scott never really attempted to remain unknown. Seventeenth and 18th-century publishers often put out work whose true authorship was hidden even from them. Manuscripts were dropped off at dead of night by intermediaries in heavy disguise. In Memoriam, bedside reading for Queen Victoria, made ...”

“... was not faulty because it neglected the vagaries of human moods; its mistake was to think that the unknown future could be turned into a set of calculable risks and, in effect, conjured out of existence, which was impossible. Several centuries earlier, Pascal – one of the founders of probability theory – had come to the same conclusion, when in the ...”