“... around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was. Cusk’s first novel appeared when she was 26, and a review of it on American Amazon reads: ‘Although this is an OK book, it is nothing like Bridget Jones except that both ...”

“... a funhouse distortion of Alice’s. He too has been selected out of a crowd and pulled aside for unknown reasons: in his case, for holding dual citizenship in the US and Iraq. He was born in American airspace on an Iraqi Airways flight, which is enough for him to constitute a threat to the post-9/11 security state. After he is questioned, his baggage ...”

“... man seems to feel himself really living for the first time, enjoying, in a plenitude until then unknown to him, the wholeness of his health in his soul and body. Finally he breathes, free from all the ties with this humanity which ends up disappearing in front of his eyes, so small even in its greatest achievements – the works of giants, the labours of ...”

“... was a bastard. Cioran was horrible. Cioran was a disgusting fascist’ – addressing the unknown man as if he represented the late Romanian writer.Octavio and Marie-José (whom he always called Marie-Jo) were together until the end; perhaps they tried to remain together after he died, too. Marie-José used to say that she spoke to him every night in ...”

“... and biographies of remarkable singularity. The subjects range from the familiar to the unknown, and in date from Thecla, Paul’s disciple in the first century, to modern exemplars such as Thérèse of Lisieux, whose relics were taken into space and back, and continue to tour the world, as well as Edvige Carboni, who was declared venerable in ...”

“... not be able to discover significant new material about Lincoln – a diary, say, or previously unknown speeches and letters. Instead the biographer must take an original interpretative approach. And, against all odds, Reynolds, who teaches at the City University of New York, manages to say new and important things about Lincoln in his elegantly written ...”

“... projects in recent years. To refuse to accept as adequate the silences, or at best the words ‘unknown servant’, in the titles of so many European portraits that show black and brown figures alongside white, is to insist on the concrete relationships that produced such images and, in so doing, to begin to reckon with the histories of racialised injustice ...”

“... two months. A colleague in my office lost her cousin last month because he was kidnapped by an unknown group who called her family and asked for 15 million Syrian pounds as a ransom’ – about $6000 – ‘but the family didn’t have the money to pay. He was found dead on the outskirts of a village in the Latakia countryside on the way to Hama.’ As ...”

“... went their different ways; Eric drops out of the historical record, his date and place of death unknown. In Blacklock’s version Eric becomes a gambler and a speculator during the Gold Rush, which makes him a rebellious reflection of the eldest brother, George, a mining engineer. It is the third son, William, who has the furthest to fall. When Sebastian ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to be treated for alcoholism. Reilly began a relationship with a woman called Anne (surname unknown, possibly a colleague). He left Port Arthur at the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. Anne may have gone with him (they may even have got married) but she soon drops out of view and he’s making his peripatetic, priapic way back to Paris, via ...”

“... mess of all those intertangled working-class families, the ‘dissolving margins’ and the ‘unknown entities that broke down the outline of the world’; the huge, sloppy ethical and political questions, the incontinent, unseemly splurge of all those enormous books. As early as The Water Statues, Jaeggy could be bothered with none of it: ‘Such ...”

“... Hopkins’s St Eadburga’s, Worcester. The use of negatives is sparing but effective. ‘Widely unknown’ (describing a minor architect) is one of the best.By the end of the project Pevsner felt that he was too tired and the writing just ‘scribble, scribble, scribble. If only one could be proud of the result.’ In fact, the prose never went slack or ...”

“... he did. Without much conviction, PiS had nominated as its candidate Andrzej Duda, a relatively unknown lawyer. He turned out to be a natural campaigner and an effective conduit for unhappiness with the government. Civic Platform had presided over uninterrupted economic growth, but it was weakened after its popular leader, Donald Tusk, left to take up the ...”

“... Dionea sails away into the Mediterranean sunlight ‘in a Greek boat … singing words in an unknown tongue, the white pigeons circling around her’. Pater counted Lee as a disciple, but she had her own point to make about female sovereignty.‘Oke of Okehurst’ is, unusually among these stories, set in England. Alice Oke, like Trepka, has been fatally ...”