“... some continually flowing stream moving in one direction. Think of it more as a lava flow from some unknown source of fire. Some parts of it move forward, some parts of it branch off and form separate channels, some parts of it slow down and eventually harden. There are parts of London, I believe, where time has actually hardened and come to an end. In ...”

“... a few minutes. He left at the first opportunity, fleeing to California at the expense of an as yet unknown young Canadian admirer called Elizabeth Smart. Smart had read Barker’s poems and fallen in love with their author at a distance, determining in advance to bear him children on the grounds that they ‘would all be wonderful poets’. Her fixation might ...”

“... male inseminates a female, the rapist’s sperm and his own enter the female together. It is not unknown for males to be raped by other males while in the act of copulating with a female. It isn’t always so violent or so sordid. In Australia, there’s a certain species of wren in which two-thirds of chicks are, so to speak, bastards, fathered by males ...”

“... carrying extra oxygen would help. Above that height every step was a step into the physiological unknown. In 1921 there was a reconnaissance and, a year later, a fullblown attempt on the mountain. In June 1924 two English climbers were in a position to make a second attempt on the summit. George Mallory, now 37 years old and a Charterhouse schoolmaster, had ...”

“... a Homo sapiens. In between is the immense black box of development which hides the complex and unknown ways in which genes interact with each other and with their environment. The intricacy of such interactions, only now starting to be unravelled by developmental biologists, guarantees that an understanding of how genes produce individuals will not be ...”

“... and prays to the genius of the place and to the earth; he also prays to ‘nymphs and rivers yet unknown’. Even prayers to a specific place and its spirit extend outwards to include places and rivers beyond his ken. Virgil’s Italo-Roman ideal recedes just beyond the horizon of knowledge, making a mystery of home for his readers and hero alike. As Jenkyns ...”

“... distinctive ghost-white dress, which features in the movie Being John Malkovich. A hitherto ‘unknown’ photograph of Dickinson recently advertised on E-Bay, the Internet auction site. Shady dealings in allegedly ‘new’ poems by Dickinson – discovered, authenticated, sold and discredited. I recently received a flyer advertising Edie Campbell’s ...”

“... hands and ethnic and racial minorities. Most of the writers who signed up to the project were unknown, and would remain so. Others, such as Nelson Algren (the director of its Illinois branch), Conrad Aiken, Saul Bellow and John Cheever, had already begun to make their reputations. Studs Terkel would find his calling when the FWP sent him out onto the ...”

“... of grinning cats painted on walls and superimposed on placards. The cats – ‘painted by an unknown’ – are in fact of Marker’s own making; they present an irreverent counterpoint to the documentary footage and Marker’s commentary on the protests and their causes. He has been encouraged by the anger of the public response to Le Pen’s ...”

“... of text, and authentic archaic spellings, which they could only have found in obscure collections unknown even to many classicists. The problem is that the details don’t quite add up. This is not just a question of all the buildings being set askew, at a very un-Roman angle (fair enough – cameras need to be able to get all-round shots and angle views). It ...”

“... high moral tone. Agitators’ attitudes to their landlords could indeed be ambivalent: it was not unknown to read the squire a loyal address on the morning of his wedding while creeping out that very night to disembowel his cattle. Nineteenth-century Ireland still had twice as many policemen per head of population as Britain, along with garrisons of troops ...”

“... Town Hall suggested. In other words, it was important for FN voters that their choice go entirely unknown, because it would be seen as shameful, or at least controversial. Mme G told me that she liked to go through the results in the local paper, looking for the very smallest returns, and speculating as to whose grandmother was pitted against whose first ...”

“... including some that Hirsh classifies as ‘Poems whose meanings are hidden (but not necessarily unknown)’. These include ‘Ich am of Irlaunde’, that mysterious summons to the dance memorably transmogrified by Yeats. Even more enigmatic, ‘Maiden in the mor lay’ has been interpreted as everything from a dance tune to a children’s rhyme to a lyric ...”

“... Several months have passed since tea and talk in Baghdad; the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein remain unknown, but Tony Benn is alive and well and coming soon to a concert hall near you. Leaving Parliament in 2001 to devote more time to politics, Benn joined the B-list of political celebrities. He has appeared at the Glastonbury Festival and boasts his own ...”

“... original. None of them translates ‘vois-tu’, which is a pity since the address to the as yet unknown woman depends on its immediacy. In the last stanza, it becomes clear that this is not a romantic assignation but a visit to a grave (that of Hugo’s daughter Léopoldine, who drowned in 1843): Je ne regarderai ni l’or du soir qui tombe, Ni les voiles ...”