“... emancipation of women and to an African ideal of human worth, ‘moral and material misery’ are unknown on the continent ‘to the present day’. Howe admits that most bookshops contain a shelf or two of similarly crazy stuff: texts about the lost wisdom of ancient civilisations, myths of racial origin drawing on Masonic and Egyptian materials, stories of ...”

“... to ‘the scene of gay men’s bonding . . . which at the experiential level was almost totally unknown to me’. In her next book, Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick wrote more directly about gay male writers, self-fashioning and performance. She took part in Aids protest demonstrations, and ‘came out’ in a series of ...”

“... commonly a will (as our lawyers speak of ‘testamentary disposition’). This was rendered by an unknown Christian, whether a Latin-speaker misunderstanding Greek or a Greek-speaker misinterpreting his own language, testamentum, as if God could die and leave a will, as the none too bright Heracles imagines Zeus might do in ...”

“... or the Jacobin Mountain. There was also a significant counter-Revolutionary production line. Unknown numbers of engravings, both for and against the Revolution, were produced during the few years of the 1790s, but we know little about who purchased them or what they did with them. We know even less about what they meant to their owners. Such products ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 imperfect recording? Was syphilis born in Naples in 1493, or had it simply arrived from some unknown elsewhere, perhaps with Columbus from America? Advocates of the ‘natural transfer’ hypothesis, including Luc Montagnier and Robert Gallo, credited as the discoverers of HIV, have assumed that Aids was an old disorder which became subject to the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... University College, Dublin. It was a brash performance. Joyce spoke as if he were introducing an unknown poet, and chose to ignore the facts that there were several collections of Mangan’s poems at large and that his life and work had been extensively written about. ‘Mangan has been a stranger in his country,’ Joyce claimed, ‘a rare and unsympathetic ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... restored to the palatial stables of the Earl of Godolphin. In the first Black Stallion book the unknown horse – rescued from a shipwreck by young Alec Ramsey – is the extreme underdog in a match race against two famous rivals, Cyclone and Sun Raider. ‘I still think the Black can beat them,’ Alec avers at the end of Chapter 17. In the following ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... were deceived. The flood of Noah dies, the rainbow is lived. Yet from the deluge of illusions an unknown colour is saved. If Newton was guilty of unweaving the rainbow, Watkins is determined to stitch it together again. Marriage, friendship and publication had by now cured the desperate self-pity of some of the earlier verse. The matter is often light and ...”