“... of Winsford, where quite a few years later she had a seventh child, Ernest, in 1881. Father unknown. Certainly Mercy never saw William again after she left him. She worked as a midwife and domestic help, receiving intermittent parish relief – ‘sixpence a week and bread’. Mercy died of cancer when Bevin was eight, and he went to live with his ...”

“... or coconut or large amounts of onions cooked into a paste. They often contained weird ingredients unknown in India. In her 2005 book Curry: A Biography, Lizzie Collingham records that Richard Terry of the Oriental Club in London ‘not only added the by now standard apples to his mulligatawny but also bay leaves, ham and turnips’. If these were the curries ...”

“... riches. From the rooftop, his fellow citizens on the street below appear to be ‘propelled by an unknown force … pulled on a transparent string by a concealed hand’. Close up, however, it’s evident that they contract their muscles and shift their weight to move ‘in the direction they wish to go’. Blam is curious about each of them, ‘infant, girl ...”

“... and died later that day of ‘cerebral congestion’. He was 74 and by this time virtually unknown – a few lines in the daily papers were the only acknowledgment of his death. As an artist, Fragonard had often been at odds with the culture of his day. He took up the Rococo idiom decades after it had gone out of fashion, appearing to his ...”

“... to prevent the shrine’s desecration, beginning the First War of the Rif, from which a previously unknown young Spanish lieutenant called Miguel Primo de Rivera emerged a hero. Thirty years later, in the aftermath of Spain’s disastrous defeat at Annual, west of Melilla, Primo de Rivera took power in a coup and ruled Spain as dictator for most of the ...”

“... proletarian, and – though this condition might be varied when demand outpaced supply – unknown to Tom before the encounter. I still wish I had listened more attentively to the stories he told about those who, like him, yearned for anonymous sex and its corollary, which was, as he hurried to point out excitedly, dangerous sex. (Certainly, I wasn’t ...”

“... Hell consigned to ruin, Whose friend was God, but God swore not to aid me! – and the, to me, unknown poem by Ivor Gurney, addressed to God, which he wrote in Barnwood Mental Hospital, as much as a portrayal of what used to be done to patients in the name of sanity as of the insanity itself: Why have you made life so intolerable And set me between four ...”

“... experience of every reader of The Golden Bough – embarking on a journey into a frightening and unknown world, then returning safely to familiar civilisation, but now with a heightened awareness of the taboos and constraints of their own culture. In The Great Taboo, The Golden Bough shows its true colours as a voyage of exploration. There were, of ...”

“... starting around 300 BC. Whether Amaravati was intentionally destroyed or simply fell to pieces is unknown. The first record of it is in 1797, when Colonel Colin Mackenzie, later Surveyor-General of India, visited the site and describe ‘a great low mound, the upper part of which rose in a turreted shape to the height of twenty feet’, with a diameter at the ...”

“... one of organisation rather than technique. He points out that there was no structural principle unknown to medieval practice involved in building the Louvre. One can even make modern comparisons. Goy calculates that Contarini’s workmen laid bricks at about the same rate (around four hundred per day) as a modern bricklayer. Building load-bearing structures ...”

“... its greatest challenge to the reader in its opening chapter, ‘The Basic Annals of Qin’: the unknown names come thick and fast, and the action is tersely described and often opaque in motivation to those without any background in Chinese history. But certain themes swiftly begin to emerge: the force of omens in the Qin rise, the skills with animals shown ...”

“... glory of the nation state were both satisfied. He brought to his subject a moral seriousness quite unknown in England at the time. During his visit he nevertheless hoped to meet someone who occupied a professional position in London similar to his own in Berlin. One possible equivalent was John Nash, the royal architect: had they met, their interview would ...”

“... absolutists for whom René Char’s question is a living demand: ‘how can we live without the unknown before us?’ The answer is ‘we’ cannot, and that impossibility contains an awful series of catastrophic microhistories – madnesses, suicides, ruined souls and ruined bodies for whom, in Guy Debord’s words, ‘oblivion is our ruling ...”

“... contemplating images of the Madonna and child, is broody. Like Colin restlessly envisioning his unknown father, Edwin wonders whether his meagre life might be transformed by a child. ‘If he and Cecilia had had children, if they had a daughter, would their lives be different? Would there be more meaning in the antics which were part of the daily ...”

“... internalises the novel’s action; Balzac grounds it in history; Flaubert researches the hitherto unknown territory of the everyday; in Kafka the open horizons of Cervantes and Diderot are replaced by a bureaucratic system as labyrinthine as it is unintelligible. In a professedly academic writer such summary treatments would seem hopelessly slapdash, but in ...”