“... In the 1950s, three individuals, unknown to one another and from different countries, were engaged in what seem, looking back, to have been remarkably similar projects vis-à-vis those whom society designates as mad. One was a philosophy student: ‘I used to work in a psychiatric hospital in the 1950s. After having studied philosophy, I wanted to see what madness was: I had been mad enough to study reason; I was reasonable enough to study madness ...”

“... bushytail to mangy endgame quarry’. But however much future historians may discover which is unknown to the commentators of the present day, and however right or wrong Blair may be in believing that they will be kind to him, it is unlikely that either his committed admirers or his committed detractors will be led to change their views. To his ...”

“... it has been said, is a nowhere of sorts: unreal, isolated, out of time, attractive to exiles, unknown to almost everybody else. So it was an apt city to serve as the final home of a man regarded as one of the most unreal, isolated and timeless figures of the Victorian era. Richard Burton arrived in the Adriatic port in 1873 as Britain’s consul. He had ...”

“... world; he has twinned with him, just as in his poem ‘Vanishing Twin’ he paired himself with an unknown womb-sister who ‘bled away’, and whose dreams were contiguous with his. But the male twin would not always be a friendly companion; later he would trail the writer through the streets of Cambridge, fuelling his psychotic terror. ‘To protect myself ...”

“... of Lowell seems to be stuck in 1955 and their (unsuccessful) espousal of Schuyler, who is almost unknown in England and underappreciated in the States, rarely goes beyond perplexity and adulation. A typical sentence is Howard Moss’s ‘How Schuyler manages to be absolutely truthful and an obsessed romantic at the same time is his secret.’ Well, perhaps ...”

“... sleep deprivation, been forced to make a false confession after sitting in a room listening to an unknown woman screaming next door, been kept for eight months in solitary confinement in a tiny steel cell with no natural light, witnessed the murder of two prisoners by US guards, and been constantly and repetitively questioned about fantastical crimes for ...”

“... just possibly future ages may be able to see.’ She goes on to invoke George Herbert’s ‘Love Unknown’, translating his figure of the life touched by God into secular terms: ‘But I think we should be gay in spite of it, sometimes even giddy – to make life endurable and to keep ourselves “new, tender, quick”.’ Some of the drafts Quinn has ...”

“... the many medications he was taking – some of them apparently taken inappropriately – was unknown then (it is hardly better known now). There is still a certain amount of speculation about his diseases and disabilities, but it sometimes seems a wonder that he could function at all. ‘Stoically refusing to let health concerns stop him,’ Dallek ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... about the tsar’s murder captioned ‘Is one of the daughters alive?’, and Clara said to Miss Unknown: ‘I know who you are. You are Grand Duchess Tatiana.’ Again Anna refused to speak, then went along with the identification, then changed her mind after a former lady-in-waiting to the tsarina visited the asylum and said that Anna was too short to be ...”

“... have pounded the territory seized in eastern Myanmar, 50,000 civilians have been displaced and unknown numbers have died. The pattern of heavy losses spurring extreme violence is a familiar one. Efforts by Western powers to undermine the junta have been sluggish: last month the US followed the European Union in imposing a ban on financial transactions with ...”

“... a mysterious legacy from her estranged husband which suddenly doubles on the death of its other, unknown, beneficiary; but – in notable contrast to Pip in Great Expectations – Eliza gives the money to the mixed-race children whom she discovers, via a dirty version of Dickens’s lawyer, Jaggers, her husband had with his mistress.That act of Eliza’s ...”

“... him when he took off into the fields to paint. Degas expressed the desire to be ‘illustrious yet unknown’, but Monet probably achieved this better than Degas. Wullschläger’s biography describes him excellently and makes shrewd deductions, while leaving a hard centre of unknowability (of which Monet would doubtless have approved). His early life, of ...”

“... of pages of recently released FBI intercepts, more than two hundred interviews, and previously unknown audio tapes recorded by King’s wife, Coretta, after his death. Does all this produce a strikingly new portrait of King? Not really: the trajectory of his life is, in the end, familiar. But Eig offers affecting accounts of the Montgomery bus ...”