“... Jesus, addressing God, says Abba instead of ‘Father’. This way of addressing God is apparently unknown in Jewish tradition; the Aramaic word Abba, MacCulloch writes, means something more like ‘dad’ than ‘father’. The followers of Jesus are told to use the normal Greek word for ‘father’ (pater). Is there a reason for this? The learned must ...”

“... is my Proust!’) have declared their loyalty to his radical voice. Normance was probably unknown to these writers, but its style and ambitions would be largely familiar. We need only look at a single page of this book or of any of his novels after Voyage au bout de la nuit – the exclamation marks like spittle or gunfire, the ellipses forbidding us ...”

“... Fred Inglis appears to take at face value in his new biography), he was accosted by an unknown American student outside Thornton’s bookshop on Broad Street and invited to sail with him and his student crew to Greece. He agreed; they left in June and Collingwood came back only shortly before war was declared. In 1940, his account of the ...”

“... by five masked men who were never caught. The men allegedly belonged to a left-wing group that was unknown before the assassination and mysteriously disbanded after it.) In 1993, the Honduran government published the results of an investigation into human rights abuses in the 1980s. The report named 184 people, mainly trade unionists and popular leaders, who ...”

“... brothers’ satirical fantasy Monday Begins on Saturday. (A grim and gleaming nocturne set in an unknown realm of secret laboratories and installations, Nine Days in One Year is a romantic triangle involving two nuclear scientists, one doomed by his accidental exposure to atomic radiation. Lighter and more subversive, the Strugatsky novel is set at the ...”

“... readings. Perhaps the Heathcliff-Catherine relationship is as sexless as it is because the two, unknown to themselves, are half-siblings, with an unconscious fear of incest. There is certainly a case to be made that in presenting his family with Heathcliff, old Earnshaw is actually palming off one of his bastards on them. Yet children unsettle gender ...”

“... Obviously there is no direct equivalence between what Ellroy does in these pages and what the unknown psychopath did to Elizabeth Short; nor do his crimes against women – so far as we can tell – seem to have amounted to much more than the derelictions and histrionics that many sick men inflict on women (or indeed, vice versa). Nevertheless, on ...”

“... thing leads to another. Yet by the end it’s fate that has determined the outcome. A previously unknown witness steps forward, the killer makes a mistake, the detective trips up and there on the carpet is the piece of evidence he’s been looking for all along. (Or: De Gaulle ducks at the last moment; the only non-murderer on the train happens to be Hercule ...”

“... interpretation, but the Treaty of Union belongs to a category of convention hitherto unknown to constitutional jurisprudence. The pretence that Scotland was amalgamated with England in 1707 by way of a measure known as the Act of Union is what might be called a convention of non-recognition; more precisely, it is a near universally unacknowledged ...”

“... Leclerc thought the bones might belong to a species that, uniquely in history and for reasons unknown, had disappeared from the Earth, but his conjecture was widely rejected. Thomas Jefferson put forward the consensus view in 1781, in his Notes on the State of Virginia: ‘Such is the economy of nature, that no instance can be produced of her having ...”

“... something interesting must always be done with what’s there. ‘The child entered this room unknown to her with an inhuman absence of awe or interest. She took her bearings, but in an abstract way – the draped dishevelled big bed, prodigal dressing table, strewn sofa …’ Alice Munro is at the plain end of the spectrum of style. ‘Maury was in the ...”

“... that he is plotting to murder her and her children in the same way he has successfully killed unknown numbers of vulnerable women before her. This is the cold heart of Quiet Dell, a story given in advance (it’s there in full on the front jacket flap). In 1930s America the murders were big news, but Phillips makes little of the blood and gore. Unlike the ...”

“... regularly invoked in accounts of statues over the centuries. Sculpture in the round was not unknown in medieval art, but an implicit decorum demanded that it be contained by an architectural framework – embedded in portal decoration, for example, or set into niches and tabernacles. In the Christian imagination, the free-standing statue on a column was ...”

“... of slavery … exposing every man’s house to be entered into and searched at pleasure by persons unknown to him’, and was replaced in 1696 by the less intrusive window tax. The material trappings of private life evolved as even poor households invested in valuable bedding, pewter and linen rather than cows and sheep, and credit-bearing assets were ...”

“... Orgères-en-Beauce, between Chartres and Orléans. Nine months earlier, Lescarbault had watched an unknown object pass across the face of the Sun. Le Verrier rushed to Orgères, where Lescarbault ‘permitted us to examine his instruments closely and gave us the most detailed explanations of his work’, which ‘gave us total conviction that the detailed ...”