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“... to mean that the Italian people had quite recently become spectacularly corrupt, for reasons unknown. But soon it was recognised that what was new was only the exposure of long-established corruption, and that it was not a people that was corrupt but rather a specific political system, controlled by party bureaucracies headed by rival cliques or ...”

“... narcissism’, but in our bid for normal adulthood we hurled our libidinal harpoons out into the unknown, hoping to wind them back with a big enough catch to feed our sexual hunger for ever. But this self-centred theory of love has been pretty decisively snookered during the 20th century. Freud’s own consulting-room, for a start, received hundreds of ...”

“... present to her gaze as if in a time capsule which has unexpectedly brought him before her from an unknown, strangely other dimension of time, speaking, ‘for those who want to listen, about the hopelessness of attempting to detain life, the vanity of hanging onto what is gone, the beauty of the marks of time’. There is no sense of loss, of regret, of a ...”

“... Political Tragedy in Six Acts’? In the Seventies, when Havel was still a relatively unknown Czech dissident writer, Keane played a crucial role in making him known in the West: he organised the publication of Havel’s political texts and became a friend. He also did much to resuscitate Havel’s notion of ‘civil society’ as the site of ...”

“... that he had died, Mossy remembered the visit. After a search among the many unclaimed copies of unknown men, women and children stacked around the walls of his studio he found the lady.’ Hunty’s pen raced. Lennox emptied his brandy glass. Hunty loudly called for more. The beautiful young colleen who enchanted the heart of James Joyce, shapely and ...”

“... saw a hanging, despite subsequently claiming to have done so twice more in print; and I found (unknown to Mr Lodge) another independent witness. So there is at least an element of doubt about the eye-witness authenticity of ‘A Hanging’, a possibility that it is a fiction ...   It is very unlikely, at this date, that we shall ever be able to ...”

“... the President and the Senate. The cabinet usually consists of unknowns (sometimes they are even unknown to the President) and the process of choosing is extraordinarily complicated. It is characteristic of President Carter that his own account of his Presidency should begin by describing his dithering over whom he should appoint to various posts (he ...”

“... Sceptics, however, died out; their writings disappeared. Though Cicero’s Academica was not unknown during the Middle Ages, Scepticism emerged again only when the Renaissance rediscovered Sextus. The price of resurrection was, as always, transformation. The differences between ancient and modern Scepticism are obvious from the opening pages of ...”

“... princess who kissed the frog/so he became a prince’ in order to impose on the tale a conclusion unknown to the Opies: ‘Though courtship turns frogs into princes,/marriage turns them quietly back again.’ In ‘Laocoön’, she makes the familiar myth of unexpected suffering, where we pity the men attacked, an allegory of men’s aggression against ...”

“... seeing that the country had so many valuable raw materials. Drug production and dealing were not unknown in Soviet times, but they were limited. ‘When Soviet controls fell apart,’ Sterling writes, things changed. By 1992, family-sized poppy fields yielding two crops a year were rationalised and put under heavy armed guard. New plantations in Uzbekistan ...”

“... There was a wife. Her name was Khazina before they married. (The very existence of Nadezhda was unknown even to Gleb Struve and Boris Filippov, editors of Mandelstam’s Collected Works in the USA.) Was Strakhovsky (another memoirist) still alive? Yes? A great pity. He might go on lying about Mandelstam. He had written nonsense about her, also. He had left ...”

“... when the planes and smoke trails above them told the opposite story. But these facts were unknown to the wider public and did nothing to stem the tide of myth-making. Stourton credits the BBC with the central role in Dunkirk’s metamorphosis from military disaster to glorious escape, and rates the men who helped achieve it, Churchill and ...”

“... Policeman Said (1974), a famous actor stuck in an alternative universe where he is unemployed and unknown, asks a young woman whether he is ‘a hallucination of yours’; she responds: ‘Maybe … you’re a product of my delusional mind.’ The worst thing that can happen to Dick’s characters – and it happens to them over and over again – is to ...”

“... to chair five consecutive meetings of Cobra, the government’s crisis committee. It is almost unknown for the prime minister not to chair Cobra when he or she is in London. According to David King, the former government chief scientific adviser, Blair and Brown never failed to chair a Cobra meeting. Johnson failed five times in a row, always on the ...”

“... which builds characteristically from weakness to strength, ends by centring on the irreducible unknown lives that Herbert imagines, ‘a city where a man died yesterday someone went mad/someone coughed hopelessly all night’:                depending on the train’s directionjust before or just after the city a mountain suddenlyrose up from a ...”