“... regularly close for lack of supplies, teachers haven’t been paid in months and tourists are unknown. On the largest island, 60 per cent of the inhabitants have access to electricity, while only 20 per cent of those on the smallest island do. Since gaining independence from France in 1975, the Comoros has seen twenty coups. Behind many of them was Bob ...”

“... the bomber. From 1968 the British nuclear deterrent depended on submarines. At the same time, unknown to the public, British and US submarines were monitoring their Russian counterparts, participating in their exercises uninvited and usually unobserved, quietly trailing and watching them closely until they reached their bases. By the 1980s there were many ...”

“... such as spitting blood (usually a sign of tuberculosis). Whether the Herball was effective is unknown, but Stephen Rutherford, who brings a biomedical perspective to his reading of civil war surgical texts, finds much to admire. There was an understanding, at least among military surgeons like Richard Wiseman (a royalist), of the refracted trajectory of a ...”

“... see him suddenly, and from many angles, and he often doesn’t know we are watching. Written in an unknown hand on an early, c.1484 black chalk drawing of a Lady Carrying a Hawk is the note: ‘This is also old. Albrecht Dürer did it for me, before he entered Wolgemut’s house to become a painter, up in the top attic of the back quarters of the house, in the ...”

“... a ‘bouffant hairdo like a fourth Supreme’. In fact, the so-called ‘no-hit Supremes’ were unknown in 1961, though their debut single, ‘I Want a Guy’, an aficionado’s favourite, was released that year when they were a four-piece.Still, there is a lot to be said for Whitehead’s depiction of Carney’s struggle. He is not a pioneer for social ...”

“... of a shipwreck survivor carried on ocean currents to the South Pole, where he fetches up on an unknown island with a temperate climate and an ancient civilisation. Poe was inspired by the real-life adventurer John Symmes, who was fundraising at the time for an expedition to the North Pole, which he believed to be the entrance to a subterranean hollow ...”

“... in the book is the SNP’s onetime guru-in-chief, the late Stephen Maxwell, whose name is largely unknown even to those who follow Scottish politics. Nobody did more than Maxwell to formulate the now dominant idea of left-wing nationalism. As late as 1982, Alex Salmond and other members of the Maxwellite 79 Group were expelled from the SNP – briefly, as it ...”

“... however, was Patrick Vieira. Before Wenger arrived at Arsenal, he told the club to buy this young, unknown central midfielder from AC Milan. Arsenal were down 1-0 at home to Sheffield Wednesday on 16 September 1996 when, in the 28th minute, Vieira came on for his debut, replacing the injured Ray Parlour. Arsenal went on to win 4-1. According to Dennis ...”

“... equality were risibly unconvincing. At a time when the dangers of second-hand smoke were largely unknown, the impulse behind non-smokers’ rights wasn’t scientific but civic – ‘a vision of public space as an amenity to be consumed’, as Milov puts it. Non-smokers demanded to be spared the unpleasantness of smoky restaurants, planes and bus ...”

“... among other things, to the truly astonishing performances she has managed to coax from previously unknown young actors. Arnold was appointed OBE in 2011. Who knows what honours are awarded for these days, but it’s reassuring to discover that an urban fox-themed depiction of cunnilingus won’t necessarily rule you out.Arnold’s second feature film, Fish ...”

“... as ‘our regicide-hunter-in-chief’.The New England experiences of Whalley and Goffe are not unknown to historians; Christopher Pagliuco’s The Great Escape of Edward Whalley and William Goffe (2012) and Matthew Jenkinson’s Charles I’s Killers in America: The Lives and Afterlives of Edward Whalley and William Goffe (2019) both feature in Harris’s ...”

“... written between 1560 and 1650 (he lists 81 of them). This is an astonishing archive, totally unknown today. None of these pieces established any kind of reputation at the time since settings of the Requiem, though clearly in demand, were considered so plain and commonplace that they excited little interest; and almost none has been reprinted since. In ...”

“... the sort of thing which in our own time Sir John Hackett would fully understand. It has not been unknown in great soldiers; neither was Lawrence’s other quality, a dishevelled contempt for punctilio and natty dress; Oliver Cromwell, no less, was referred to in awe as ‘that sloven’. Lawrence, for all his fervour and dash of fanaticism, was soft-voiced ...”

“... as it is social. Moreland remains fascinating because, in his unsecretive, entertaining way, unknown – an individual. At the end of the sequence, the aesthetic and contemplative Nick has to face the fact that of all his old associates his most constant fellow-traveller has been the gross careerist, Widmerpool. Ironies of this kind may be allowed to ...”

“... apologises to du Maurier’s children for exposing ‘events in their mother’s life which were unknown to them and which have proved painful for them to discover’. The apology is seemly, but she must have had qualms when explaining that du Maurier had wished ‘all truth’ to be told after her death, for, as she has shown, the truth as it is commonly ...”