“... plagued the country bothered to learn much French, or bring it home with them, remains unknown. Butterfield notes that Shakespeare’s Pistol and his French prisoner continue a long tradition of mutual incomprehension. If Henry V had not died young, France might indeed have become the subsidiary realm of an English king, as the long continuing ...”

“... with the Christian dynasty of Alfred the Great, stubbornly, often successfully, and to some unknown extent out of heathen conviction. It’s likely that there was a lot more apostasy in the Danelaw, even among those of English birth, than Christian chroniclers were prepared to admit. As late as 1000, Archbishop Wulfstan half concedes that for an English ...”

“... from the Restoration poet Sir John Denham’s praise of Abraham Cowley: ‘To him no author was unknown,/Yet what he wrote was all his own.’ As it happens, it was Cowley’s rhapsodic style Swift began his career by imitating, so that (he bragged to a cousin in 1692) ‘when I writt what pleases me I am Cowley to my self.’ These early poems, Leo ...”

“... In between​ the metaphysics, the memoiring and a previously unknown addiction to vanilla ice cream, there’s been some doctoring, testing, diagnosing and everyday hovering and waiting. Plus standing by for the new grandchild, whom I don’t suppose I’ll know for very long, scoops of the vanilla ice cream, and statistics that will no more keep me alive than the eggs, cream and vanilla pods ...”

“... accounts by more than thirty ancient Greek and Latin authors tell how the petrified remains of unknown creatures were revealed by erosion, storms, floods, earthquakes and human digging. Great excitement surrounded the discoveries, as people journeyed to view the bones and measured the skull capacities of beasts never seen alive. Speculating on what they ...”

“... is the norm, but where public sacrifice (unlike in the days of the freedom struggle) is almost unknown – these were unusual acts. I seriously considered joining them, though I’d never associated the Sahitya Akademi award I’d got for my fourth novel, A New World, with the state. It was a book that had been excoriated by Delhi’s reviewers for lacking ...”

“... in order to speak to Abraham, must come from somewhere, must enter the earthly realm from some unknown heights or depths. Whence does he come, whence does he call to Abraham? We are not told … Of Abraham too, nothing is made perceptible except the words in which he answers God: Hinne-ni, Behold me here … Moreover, the two speakers are not on the same ...”

“... poem of modernism. He is remembered as a kind of New York saint, an urban Emily Dickinson: the unknown poet, walking the city streets, writing intense, seemingly matter-of-fact lyrics about things he saw and heard. And then, in the last decades of his life, devoting himself to two obsessional projects: the more than five hundred pages of Testimony, drawn ...”

“... the rebel enclave. The murder of 85 civilians confirmed by multiple sources and the killing of an unknown number of people with bombs and shells were certainly atrocities. But it remains a gross exaggeration to compare the events in East Aleppo – as journalists and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic did in December – with the mass slaughter of ...”

“... sexually deviant, and reveals himself to be on a mission of redemption before leaving for parts unknown, Smith bears a slight resemblance to you-know-who as sketched in Unapologetic, though – with a C.S. Lewis-like disdain for mythological niceties – he’s also likened to a folkloric trickster and makes his exit on a sleigh on Christmas Day. If the ...”

“... seem most relaxed or stiff – who is present, who is absent? He observes the white socks of an unknown man in a snapshot taken in Vienna in the 1930s, and we learn that this attire reveals the man’s probable Nazi affiliation. He combs the archives for pictures from inside the Nuremberg courtroom, looking for clues about who was present during certain ...”

“... When the young daughter of one of his workmen was dying, the earl, to whom the girl was a complete unknown, insisted on being present at her death and had to be forcibly prevented from entering the house by her outraged father. The workman was able to allow his daughter to die in peace, but only at the cost of not being present at her deathbed ...”

“... genuinely new, but Freeman has managed to do just that. Why has this history remained virtually unknown? For one thing, the sources historians rely on to study congressional proceedings intentionally downplayed these events. The official record of votes, speeches and debates, the Congressional Globe, studiously avoided mentioning violent incidents. Until ...”

“... and gristle of Chicago: the jazz that is beauty in the destruction of the past, the jazz of an unknown future, the jazz that promises freedom from the bad old times. This may have been an appealing urban serenade to young vloggers in 2011, but only if they had their eyes tightly closed and headphones on. It is not the history-burdened, misery-stained city ...”

“... tails to people’s heads, flung impressive-sounding names around, and invented ‘new bones unknown in the European skeleton’. But they also observe that the refusal of Arab doctors to follow modern Western medical science probably ‘saved them the fruitless labour of wading through the ingenious and exploded theories’ fashionable in Europe ...”