“... if dire things don’t occur, the political geography of the Republic will be transformed with unknown consequences. The population of an all-Ireland Republic would grow by 35 per cent, climbing above that of Norway or Denmark. Sinn Féin, as the largest political party in the North and the largest opposition party in the South, would be much ...”

“... without her consent. In her memoir, La Prédation (nom féminin), Ducey writes that as a young, unknown actress she felt that she couldn’t speak up, but that during the second take she grabbed the man by the throat, preventing him from doing it again. Ducey blames Breillat for the episode, which Breillat denies ever took place. ‘I was right there, with ...”

“... had a genome different from both Neanderthal and modern human DNA. It represented a previously unknown type of human, soon given the name ‘Denisovans’. (The name was chosen deliberately to avoid designating a new species, in recognition that the notion of distinct human species had been confounded by the interbreeding of Neanderthals and modern ...”

“... the main hall. But the script gives her nothing to do except yearn for Matt Damon, for reasons unknown. The couple have no chemistry and nothing in common. Throughout his wanderings, the uxorious Odysseus clings to a little doll figure, intended to represent his wife (like the spinning top clutched by Leonardo di Caprio in Inception); the real woman is ...”

“... to the theme of free trade, and c) deterred a speedy and rational response to a danger of as yet unknown proportions. A normal PM would have muttered, ‘Oh yes, I see what you mean,’ and cut it out. But this is not a normal prime minister.A month later, Johnson was still boasting about shaking hands with all and sundry. It was seven weeks to the day from ...”

“... Bathurst’ so opaque – the pointilliste descriptions of locality, the allusions to persons unknown, the baffling stories of lost directions. These are some of the ways in which ordinary movement of plot is counteracted in ‘Mrs Bathurst’ by Kipling’s high, studied yet natural brilliancy of form and style. There are a good many different dimensions ...”

“... us to believe that they could be effectually subdued. But the cholera was something outlandish, unknown, monstrous; its tremendous ravages, so long foreseen and feared, so little to be explained, its insidious march over whole continents, its apparent defiance of all the known and conventional precautions against the spread of epidemic disease, invested it ...”

“... curiosity about my mother’s existence because thoughts of her were intolerable, or that, all unknown to me, I was contentedly, not to say harmoniously, living out a recognised phenomenon of the physical universe.My daughter, Chloe, was halfway through her A-level course when she asked me one day how you find out if someone is dead. I was evasive: as far ...”

“... and reefs. On the first day, for instance, off Cannes, he tells the extraordinary (and to me unknown) story of Paganini’s burial. The great violinist had died of cholera in 1840, and his corpse was being taken home to Genoa by his son. But the Genoese declined to let the body ashore for fear of infection, a refusal repeated at Marseille, and then at ...”

“... that a person has died a violent or unnatural death, or when someone has died suddenly of an unknown cause, or died in prison or in circumstances such as to require an inquest under any other act, then the coroner must hold an inquest as soon as it is practicable. A jury may or may not be summoned, but either way the inquest must decide, first, who the ...”

“... decades later, despite 19 appeals by his lawyers. Many have argued that the real culprit was an unknown veteran of Japan’s wartime Unit 731, the biological warfare complex that tortured thousands of prisoners to death in medical experiments; and that American, Soviet and Japanese leaders conspired to hide the truth, to protect the militarily useful ...”

“... that Shakespeare’s father had been buried in the churchyard, the whereabouts of the grave now unknown. So when, waiting for the service to start, I went out for a pee under one of the yews in a sheltered corner of the cemetery I may well have been pissing on Shakespeare’s dad’s grave. More decorously, Richard’s massive coffin was resting where ...”

“... tears to shed for the losers. ‘I confess to having little compassion for the toiling masses of unknown men, whose lives are mired in misery and pain.’ He attributes this to the terrible strains his mother’s long-term insanity had placed on her only son. ‘I sometimes feel that each of us is born with a measure of compassion, which is easily exhausted ...”

“... Not the least interesting finds are those of preparatory documents for Runnymede, such as the ‘Unknown Charter’ and the ‘Articles of the Barons’. Scholars argue about precisely how these fit into the narrative. For our purposes, what they testify to is the zeal and attention to detail of the barons’ task force, and the no less formidable ...”

“... of suspense as The Perils of Pauline. Williams’s early life was exhaustively told in Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams by Lyle Leverich, who died before he could complete a second volume but left his trove of materials to Lahr. The new book doesn’t go back over that early ground, but includes enough to sketch in the family dynamics that gave Williams ...”