“... the cadet corps, which had been thinned down during the fracas and its deadly aftermath, when an unknown number were shot after being told they could walk free from a police station in Rabat.The next step, for Hassan and Oufkir, was to implicate the UNFP in the failed putsch and present the various sources of opposition as a single, homogeneous threat to the ...”

“... friends after he, Viktor Kulivar ‘Karabas’, was felled on this spot by 19 bullets from an unknown assassin’s semi-automatic: ‘The sacred clay holds the remains/Of Viktor Pavlovich, our dear Karabas’. Karabas was gunned down in 1997. He and his mob had taken over the port city of Odessa as law and order disintegrated in the wake of the Soviet ...”

“... at least one prominent Vermeer scholar, John Michael Montias, has speculated that several of the unknown women in Vermeer’s paintings are the artist’s wife or daughter. Perhaps the order of things was a bit more bourgeois in 17th-century Holland: though biographical data for the Dutch are comparatively scarce, they may have been more inclined than their ...”

“... enough to make her his heir. ‘I was their Joynt Play Thing & although Education was a Word then unknown, as applied to females; They had taught me to read, & speak, & think, & translate from the French, till I was half a Prodigy.’ She learned French, Spanish and Italian (translating Racine freely in her critique of Pope’s Essay on Man, and Spectator ...”

“... puzzled or even prudish innocence: ‘the effing and blinding that is the vernacular today’ was unknown in his family. Perhaps he doesn’t realise just how interesting he is in this respect. He comes from a society which has vanished almost without trace, the respectable or ‘self-helping working class’: the chapel-goers who went on to create a Labour ...”

“... by the 15 June rallies, the regime launched a massive crackdown, the full extent of which remains unknown. It banned all demonstrations, threatened to execute anyone participating in or calling for such protests, and sent out tens of thousands of Revolutionary Guards and Basijis armed with assault weapons as well as motorbikes, knives and truncheons. It sent ...”

“... age-old plant diversity. Not one variety of maize but many, adapted to different altitudes; grains unknown to us, and the ubiquitous quinoa, rich in protein. It is possible to imagine that when the industrial world suffers a dreadful blight on its monoculture of crops, only the Peruvian highlands will survive. Down to the Apurimac at 5000 feet – happily for ...”

“... US and its allies. Mullah Hassan went into hiding when Kandahar fell in 2001. His whereabouts are unknown, as are Mullah Omar’s. He is said to live near Quetta but no diplomat, politician or journalist has been able to meet him since 2001. Occasional statements on the Taliban website are all we have to go by. So the important questions remain ...”

“... is no uncharted territory left on the surface of the Earth. If you wanted to set out exploring unknown terrain with a map that could still even half-plausibly claim ‘here be dragons,’ you’d have to go deep underwater, deep underground or into deep space. The Nasa/METI map is a triumph of 21st-century technology and international co-operation. But ...”

“... this list the deliberately baroque effects of ‘vast and vague and necessary death’ or ‘this unknown/and anxious and brief thing that is life’; and I wouldn’t exclude an element of parody from some of the other instances. Nevertheless, there is a dispiriting reliance on mere description, as if much of the hard work in the poems had been given over to ...”

“... certain that she’ll find them again. One day or other, the orphan will be taken in by persons unknown, who’ll adopt her and she’ll spend the rest of her days among them. Unless she wanders off again. Pre-Islamic rhapsodes recited these story-poems, which laid down the rhythms, plots, rhymes and other verbal patterning for subsequent ...”

“... a false beard for the real thing’ began to fall into place. Real beards were almost unknown in 18th-century Europe except among Jews, and one of the authors of Pope ein Metaphysiker! was indeed a bearded Jew. He was 25 years old, and had been raised in Dessau with Yiddish as his first language, then schooled in Hebrew and the Talmud before ...”

“... disposal to do useful work at the NSA. It’s also a good primer in how to learn things that are unknown to anybody other than the Mexican president-elect, and perhaps his wife. There are rarely complaints in the US media about the practice of spying on leaders and diplomats from foreign countries. It has always been seen as a relatively uncontroversial part ...”

“... is the prize she eventually gains. What is less often observed is the technical delicacy – unknown in fiction before her – with which Austen has dramatised Elizabeth’s ability to hide her feelings from herself. Think of the way Mr Darcy, having been repulsed in his two previous efforts to get her to dance with him, finally claims her as his ...”

“... a woman playwright who has been unable to work, she says, since she was randomly beaten up by an unknown assailant: ‘In a sense, her work had jumped out of a bush and attacked her.’ Lots of people feel like that, the narrator observes, ‘not about work but about life itself’. The playwright’s story, like all the stories, is told in a plain, clear ...”