“... to him with a proposal concerning a manuscript submitted to a prize competition by a 17-year-old unknown called Fuka-Eri. Air Chrysalis is a clumsily written yet haunting novella about a girl, a dead goat and certain ‘Little People’. If Tengo fixes up the writing, Komatsu says, Fuka-Eri will realise ‘every writer’s dream! Huge headlines in the ...”

“... The Life was a homemade bomb; the History was a meteorite, a bolide from somewhere remote and unknown. It inspired Tennyson to try to reactivate English verse drama with Queen Mary. It’s huge – two and a half million words in six and a half thousand pages and 12 volumes, twice the length of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall and three times that of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... gone away but is keeping quiet in its corner of my left lung, while the fibrosis situation is an unknown until I have a scan at the end of November, but is much worse than when I first wrote about it. How many lung cancers equal a rapidly inflamed fibrosis of the lung? I stopped taking the pills after a month or so because they made me sick, nauseous and ...”

“... Winkler, whom he calls admiringly the ‘great optimist of the West’. Though he is relatively unknown outside Germany, a remarkable burst of productivity late in his career has turned Winkler into the most influential German historian of his day. Moving from the University of Freiburg in the early 1990s to take over the history department at the Humboldt ...”

“... of 12 million ethnic Germans from East-Central Europe at the end of the Second World War caused an unknown number of deaths, certainly hundreds of thousands, and the Balkan Wars of the 1990s introduced the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ into the vocabulary of atrocity. Even before the 20th century, countless millions of supposedly inferior indigenous peoples had ...”

“... Lonsdale made use of seven volumes of Losh’s travel journals. Their whereabouts after that are unknown. All that remains beside his published account are his copies of parts of the journals, notes made by the vicar of Wreay, some papers in the Carlisle Record Office and the diaries of Losh’s uncle, James. For the modern biographer it is slim ...”

“... precisely, is ‘im Sinne des Führers ihm entgegenzuarbeiten’. Willikens was not revealing some unknown fact. But he was offering posterity (as well as the party comrades in front of him) a really useful way of understanding how decisions were made in the Third Reich. ‘Working towards the Führer’ explains how many initiatives, including some of the ...”

“... by a death wish, like a flower ‘giving her petals to the wind’, and looked forward to ‘the unknown liberty of not being’. Ingravallo himself is clearly no stranger to such feelings. Even more evidently, he is not interested in a solution to the murder that does not put it in relation to Liliana’s (and his own) profound emotional turmoil. But it is ...”

“... commissar-figure knocks on an old lady’s door and entreats her to write a painful letter to an unknown soldier because a second Holocaust is imminent unless people like her remind the nation of its past. But Segev should know better. After all, he was the one who first wrote about the construction and abuse of Holocaust memory in Israel. Incidents such as ...”

“... 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 ...”