“... in the fourth grade from Liberia.’ There’s also a José and a child named Shi-shi, provenance unknown. Only Reza stands out: ‘He didn’t look like the other children – not because of his olive skin, his fierce little eyebrows, the set of his lip, but because his clothes were so tidy, so formal and foreign.’ Despite his sensitivity and charm, Reza ...”

“... stumps of Henry’s hippocampi were occasionally able to flicker into life; or they may hint at unknown levels of neuroplasticity that allow the brain to reassign tasks from its damaged regions; or they may simply have been inspired hunches, arrived at in ways impossible to describe or repeat, and invisible to the finest biological scrutiny. Henry Molaison ...”

“... concealed hand grenades, a sub-machine gun and sniper goggles. But the weapons belonged to persons unknown, and any malice on the part of the Iraqis was soon eclipsed by the criminal conduct of their captors. Over the next 36 hours soldiers of the Queen’s Lancashire took it in turn to interrogate the men. In temperatures of more than 50°C, the Iraqis were ...”

“... from another time and culture’ by today’s moral standards. Yet anti-slavery ideas were hardly unknown during Washington’s lifetime, and he himself expressed them privately. What about expecting an individual to live up to his own professed convictions? Washington deserves full credit for emancipating his slaves. Some Virginia planters, inspired by ...”

“... through their representation in literature and painting, but at the same time miraculously unknown. Paris was the city they knew best, with a ‘special knowledge “of the heart” and … an intimacy beyond factual information’. But they had factual information too, from sources ranging from Zola’s novels and Ehrenburg’s memoirs to a ...”

“... forces into political life, forces whose interaction had to be carefully managed in the face of an unknown and unknowable future.Bismarck saw himself less as a pilot – as he was depicted in a famous 1890 cartoon – than as a chessplayer, dealing not with individual decision-makers but with the interplay of powerful forces and able to put aside ideology when ...”

“... The Great Mosque at Djenné The Songhay empire, now forgotten by many Africans and largely unknown to Europeans, left a linguistic mark in the Niger basin. A dozen languages and dialects, spoken by roughly three million people, derive from the hybrid imperial vernacular. I was brought up in Niger and speak a dialect of Songhay. In my school textbooks I ...”

“... writing in general, is deep. Only one of his novels is available in English. The Smile of the Unknown Mariner, which I translated in 1994, is an antidote to Lampedusa’s The Leopard, presenting the landing of Garibaldi and the coming to power of a new class from the point of view not of the aristocracy but of the peasantry. His most recent novel is Lo ...”

“... of steam in Liverpool, en route to Canada – they cannot, when it comes to it, plunge into the unknown, they’re defeated by the amorphousness of their personalities, being products of the present time. Landlocked, they panic at the smell of the sea: Lily has the horrors as the searchlight from a lighthouse sweeps the sky: ‘She would not look up again ...”

“... the credit after his death and become world famous as a result (according to Don Foster’s Author Unknown).* War itself was not in any way considered an unpoetic activity. Voltaire, who in other circumstances lambasted France as a ‘land of monkeys and tigers’, and who lived much of his life in resentful exile across the Swiss border, nonetheless composed ...”

“... have an informed interest in very modern music, though the names of the composers they mention are unknown to the world outside. Ryder is acknowledged to be a great man as well as a world-class musician, but despite his magical acquaintance with their most private thoughts he can accomplish nothing with these people, or in this place. Everything is either next ...”

“... detention without trial by the simple expedient of labelling them unlawful combatants, a category unknown to international law. Outside the stockade, however, the trial remains very much part of the present, and Kadri’s book is a sinewy and knowledgable account of some of its historic extremes. It is not the anthology of celebrated cases that any competent ...”

“... the abstract proposition which has already been asserted as true. This mode of explanation is not unknown outside France, but it has the result here of losing all that is distinctive in the meaning of ideas, attitudes and beliefs for Muslims, since the argument is not grounded in a thorough description of their lives. On several occasions Roy refers to ...”

“... and a persecuted sense of having been trapped into the present situation by a person or persons unknown’. Barnes likes to confront the gloomy facts of existence from time to time. But he doesn’t usually do it this openly: the house rules forbid. Instead, he proceeds by indirection. Staring at the Sun is, among other things, an extended play on one of La ...”

“... that we still read him and see these plays performed today in “states unborn and accents yet unknown”, as he prophetically put it in Julius Caesar.’ However suspiciously convenient this structure may sound, and however paradoxical and question-begging Shapiro’s conclusion, it makes for a terrific read – there are few other biographical studies of ...”