“... If the book is banned in China – as Chang’s two other books, Wild Swans and Mao: The Unknown Story have been – it will not be because of theme or content. But readers should be wary of it as history. Chang has made impressive use of the rapidly expanding range of published material from the imperial archives. But understanding these sources ...”

“... they like? What was wrong? Did they have a perpetual plumbing problem? Such a thing is not unknown. Proust’s​ footwork on the topic of the noise is amazing. He thanks Mme Williams for her ‘kindly concern for his rest’. He invites her at one point to make all the noise she wants because he can’t sleep anyway. He thanks her for thinking about ...”

“... a detective: independent, impatient with trivialities, logical, and orderly to a fault. In ‘The Unknown Weapon’, the most complex of the stories, she has to solve an especially knotty murder. Graham Petleigh, the destitute son of a miserly squire is found dead outside his father’s country house. What and where is the murder weapon? Why was a large black ...”

“... from of this book,’ the librarian Mathurin Veyssière de La Croze fretted in 1718, ‘until now unknown to the learned world?’ Alongside this Latin text was a significantly different French version, the Traité des trois imposteurs. First mentioned by a lawyer from Reims in 1672, and subject to endless rumour and speculation thereafter, a text claiming ...”

“... was usually dismissive of inquiring scholars, he liked Edel’s professional manner (‘quite unknown; very meticulous’) and granted him permission to quote from James’s dramatic materials, and to compile an edition of the plays. Years later Edel gloated about the moment when, all alone with the vast and virgin James family archive, he copied some ...”

“... In closing, Churchill warned against the treachery of calculations that cannot include the great unknown variable of the enemy’s reaction. If Churchill had written nothing else, this memo alone would prove his strategic talent, and his fortitude, for in September 1941 there were no better plans than Portal’s: the US was not at war and might never be, the ...”

“... a whistle for a tail, or a clown on a string – and then, when he comes across one of those ‘unknown and poor’ street waifs of 19th-century Paris, give him a toy and watch his eyes widen. At first, Baudelaire writes, the urchin will hesitate to take it, doubting his luck, but then he’ll snatch it and run off, like a stray cat tossed a scrap which ...”

“... and electrical wiring’; he believed his attempts to buy paintings were being thwarted by unknown persons of great wealth; and he had his water tested for typhoid bacteria. He did have legitimate fears: he had a long-standing feud with the art collector Albert Barnes, who threatened to expose him as ‘a pervert – and illustrate the story with ...”

“... into an oh-so-considered sentence, it too does the work of the uncanny. The too well known as unknown. I fucking love clichés. Still, there is also the matter of just being accurate, taking the straightest route to the meaning you want. I am not on a journey, I repeat, testily. But as each of my treatments ended I found it grew harder to escape the ...”

“... culture. It has changed from a “humanity” to an “art”.’ So its power to reveal any truth unknown to scientific civilisation is neutralised. It simply says what everyone already thinks in a way that feeds the readers’ appetite for gentility, supplying ‘the high polish of civilisation’ like the electroplating on a Sheffield fish knife. The true ...”

“... young man, his eyes fixed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown.’ That giddiness is a pleasure as well as a predicament. In a postscript she adds: I went to see ‘O Processo’ – ‘The Trial’ – which is absolutely dreadful … in spite of the morbidity of Kafka etc. I like to remember that when he read his ...”

“... sought to portray its admittedly extraordinary subject as a model of chivalry. The author, alas unknown, was writing in the decade after Marshal’s death, and was well supplied with first-hand sources; they included the reminiscences of William’s surviving companion-in-arms, the knight John of Earley, who probably knew Marshal better and certainly longer ...”

“... of this work, in which Moses weeps as he leaves the care of the woman who has nursed him, and who, unknown either to him or to Pharaoh’s daughter, is his natural mother. His mother weeps too, as she receives her nurse’s wages and relinquishes her boy. The scene, explains Einberg, parallels ‘the procedures of the institution itself: babies, abandoned in ...”

“... travel books, and an explanation of why the island’s latitude and longitude co-ordinates were unknown. The mock-up extends to idiom – then, as now, travel writing was purple, and More plays this game adeptly. Some of the details suggest that life in More’s Utopia, like many others inspired by it, isn’t much fun. As Ralph Robinson’s English version ...”

“... not dead etc’ but worried about the ‘infinite mischief’ of ‘mixing of fact and fiction in unknown proportions’. When Lowell was writing Life Studies, no one had stood up for his parents, who were dead. Tate had objected to the poems on aesthetic rather than moral grounds. Anyway, the dead can’t do a thing, whereas the living can write angry ...”