“... Brownrigg’s The Metaphysical Touch, worries that sending a message to an e-mail address – an unknown place with no street name or number – is as chancy as relying on ‘pieces of paper scrolled in a bottle’ and tossed in the surf. When she leaves university, her technically-minded friends buy her a modem, hoping that she’ll keep in touch; she sends ...”

“... at the time of his death at the hands of Nazi torturers in the first days of July 1943, Moulin was unknown even among the elite circles of the day. In all likelihood, Pétain and even Laval had little idea who he was. To no other man, however – apart from Churchill – did de Gaulle owe so much, as that excessively immodest man fully understood, just as no ...”

“... the captain. When the mate had sailed close enough, Pollard yelled: ‘I have been attacked by an unknown fish, and he has stove my boat.’ The fish, probably a shark, was driven off and the boat repaired, but this reminder of the Essex’s demise raised the ugly question of what would happen if one of the boats were to founder. While ‘we should have felt ...”

“... offer him only an anchor at a familiar harbour and from which he wished to sail on to new and unknown horizons. In other words, we should never underestimate the desperation of the fat . . . Although Oliver Hardy insisted, to the end of his life, that he adored and worshipped his mother, they rarely met again, and the maverick son of the old politician of ...”

“... is threatened by the knowledge that even the most powerful states are vulnerable to assault from unknown and unpredictable sources. It can now be said that in the international arena ‘the weakest has strength to kill the strongest,’ or they would do, if only they could get their hands on the necessary equipment. This, potentially, changes everything. It ...”

“... years. His private fears, the loss of his family, friends and comrades, the terrors of the unknown occasionally break through – ‘Two years ago, I still had my normal social activity, my job, my home and my wife next to me, my brother, his child and all my near and dear ones . . . I didn’t yet think how soon I would be a refugee and didn’t ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... governed by Einstein-like equations. No need to appeal to the wild, woolly and as yet unknown laws of quantum gravity. Penrose devotes his closing chapter to ‘observational implications’. Like nearly all cosmologists, he trains his eye on the cosmic microwave background radiation as captured by the WMAP satellite. He argues that if his model ...”

“... from subversive grandees of the Cavendish Laboratory were not shocked by these affiliations. An unknown refugee in 1938, Broda, was vouched for by Sir William Bragg, president of the Royal Society, on the strength of having been the assistant of a Viennese physical chemist whose work Bragg thought well of. In 1942, James Chadwick, though well aware of Nunn ...”

“... close to him. One Sunday in September 1988, under the junta that replaced the Duvalier regime, unknown assailants wearing red armbands and carrying machine guns and machetes came to the church of St Jean Bosco where Aristide was saying mass. Soldiers and policemen stood by as the assailants began slicing through the white-garbed congregants and went for ...”

“... really do things together. Mutuality, reciprocity, the give and take of ordinary affection are unknown to them. And they are unable to see things from other people’s point of view – empathy, too, like warmth and spontaneity, being a ‘positive indicator’ of mental health. As children the autistic or those thought to be suffering from what was soon ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”