“... the war. What a pity. It would have been the ideal place for a grateful nation’s memorial to the Unknown Bank ...”

“... perilous part of the journey that we call adolescence, and finds himself or herself traversing an unknown country without a map, without a compass, and sometimes, I am afraid, from a bad home, without a guide, it is the natural change from childhood to maturity that puts ideas into young heads.It was parents, teachers and society itself, Stable said, whose ...”

“... point, Camorra lookouts – often very small boys – shout laconically to each other whenever an unknown car or a stranger enters the area. Close-up camerawork and low, or chiaroscuro lighting intensifies a sense of entrapment. There are no views of la bella Napoli, no middle-class pleasures, no escape. Even the occasional landscape scenes are gloomy and ...”

“... firm has never made the global industry’s top 200 list and was, until September 2001, virtually unknown outside the Arabian peninsula. Nonetheless, Family Business magazine estimates it to be the world’s 62nd largest family business outside the US. Its wealth accumulation started seriously only after the death of Ibn Saud in 1953. Unlike his father, Saud ...”

“... reminds us in a marvellous essay on FitzGerald, when ‘on an island to the north and west that is unknown to the cartographers of Islam, a Saxon king who defeated a king of Norway is defeated by a Norman duke.’ Khayyám’s work on cubic equations remains fundamental. It seems it was a sideline, versifying. Composing quatrains was a cultured pastime, just ...”

“... in the Cottonian Collection, just readable under ultraviolet light, was a copy of a previously unknown declaration by Edward III of October 1376, strictly limiting the royal succession to his male heirs and their male descent. This declaration was never made public, and it was quite unclear that a king had any right to regulate the succession in this ...”

“... beyond the present moment, and imagine their readers abroad, in the future, in lands or times unknown, this kind of criticism can break down, or be reduced to seeking sedimentary layers of topicality in their composition, each of which must address and can only address its own time – which again should ideally mean a week or a month. Worden will no ...”

“... Minute for the next decade. By contrast, my wife grew up in a household where radio was virtually unknown while the television was switched on in the morning and remained that way for the balance of the day. When we first got together she found my radio listening at once absurd and bizarre. ‘How on earth did they invent it,’ she once quipped, ‘did Logie ...”

“... of my body, I offer to you, so that my soul will be saved.’ According to Yovel, ‘this is unknown in Judaism, where human blood does not save.’ But if you open an Orthodox prayerbook for Yom Kippur, whether at Musaf, the final part of the morning prayer service, or the liturgical poems, or the silently recited Amida, you will find references to ...”

“... attributed to the publisher, Pratap Chandra Roy (who was made a CBE), and Ganguli’s name was unknown. The curse is working (as Anna Russell used to say of Wagner’s Ring). John Smith, earlier the author of a fine translation and study of the medieval Hindi Epic of Pabuji, is the latest to take up the challenge. He may escape the curse because his ...”

“... the discussion of The Autumn of the Patriarch, a novel ostensibly about an unnamed dictator in an unknown Latin American country. This ‘poem on the solitude of power’, as García Márquez called it, is also, as Martin remarks, a novel that ‘confronted the pitfalls of fame and power before they had even fully engulfed him’. Still, it is hard to escape ...”

“... with interior monologue, Grossman overdoes it. The reader is sprayed with mystifying allusions to unknown events which may only begin to make sense hundreds of pages into the book. Too much confusion in story telling, inner voices which aren’t always interesting, explanations too long deferred, can all test patience dangerously. To the End of the Land ...”

“... in case her hymen ruptured. It went without saying that she would have an arranged marriage. Unknown to her family, she had started a secret affair with a slightly older (unmarried) man, a thug. She told my friend that he shouted and beat her, and that he sodomised her, the reason for this being that she would still technically remain a virgin. She hated ...”

“... It has been facing food shortages at least since the early 1990s, and is experiencing a famine of unknown severity … the economy has collapsed around agriculture … The two primary fertilisers used in North Korea, urea and ammonium sulphate, are both petroleum-based, and shortages of petroleum feedstocks have adversely affected domestic production of ...”

“... a man called Ulf, who took three ‘gelds’, or pay-offs, in England: one from Tosti (unknown, not King Harold Godwinsson’s brother), one from Thorketill (probably ‘the Tall’, a leader who changed sides in disgust over the 1012 murder of Archbishop Ælfheah of Canterbury, pelted to death with ox bones) and one from Knut, i.e. King ...”