“... Mendelson and Jim Greenfield) were convicted by a majority verdict of conspiracy ‘with persons unknown’ but not of causing explosions, and the other four were acquitted on all charges. Ascribing their politics to ‘a warped understanding of sociology’, Mr Justice James sentenced the four to ten years’ imprisonment, reducing Prescott’s 15-year ...”

“... preserved a relationship of alternating but constant indebtedness. The stranger arriving at an unknown house and receiving charis could depend on his dual status as xenos – the word meant both ‘guest’ and (potential) ‘host’ – just as a poet might venture gifts of poetry to a powerful patron in exchange for lifelong protection and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... breaking of the rules of orthodox ‘masculine’ behaviour, engendered a freak, a monster, unknown to the species or to ordinary human society. Why this was so, I would think, is because ‘queening’ is, or was (maybe it has pretty much gone out in our post-Wolfenden days), an acting-out of self-hatred or desperate self-mockery. The thought occurred ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Caribbean, were too shy or too polite ever to tell their Imperial masters that frost and snow were unknown to them, and that the white mounds were heaps of the only product that made money in Turks and Caicos: salt. By the time the Turks and Caicos got their mad flag, most Victorians in the home country thought of salt, if they thought of it at all, as ...”

“... in the mysterious depth of newer and less popular characters: the Vision, Black Bolt, Omega the Unknown, Warlock, Ghost Rider, Son of Satan (was there really a comic book called Son of Satan? Yes), all of whom were brooding, tormented anti-heroes, unattractive to young children. We’d caught the outsiderish, sulky Marvel scent, and wanted our own share. In ...”

“... contrast with forgery. There is, in fact, a fourth category, known to the Irish (but apparently unknown to Groom) as ‘anti-plagiarism’. This little-known genre conflates Groom’s forgery with his plagiarism. In 19th-century Ireland, authors like William Maginn, Francis Sylvester Mahony and James Clarence Mangan were in the habit of producing literary ...”

“... from the tenth century, but not collected until some time between the 14th and 16th centuries, and unknown in Europe before the 18th. Franco Moretti, the editor of this vast two-volume anthology of essays, itself a redaction of an original five-volume work published in Italian under the title Il Romanzo, has his eye on something other than an island story. The ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... one he discovers that all the other members of the family are wearing an article of clothing in an unknown way, or have run up a frock or made a sweater or decorated their dungarees to look startlingly different. When he asks about it, they each tell him they just sort of thought they would, no big deal, gotta milk the cow, chop some wood, see ya. He stays a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”