“... there were only three ‘confidential’ (the lowest level of ‘classified’) emails. One is unknown. One informed her that Kofi Annan was stepping down as special envoy attempting to mediate the war in Syria, and the third was about Clinton’s forthcoming telephone call to Joyce Banda, the newly inaugurated president of Malawi. Lock her up! (It was ...”

“... in the National Portrait Gallery offers a grey-white face, long, guarded, medieval, remote: ‘unknown woman, formerly known as Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury’. It is painted on a dateable oak panel, and the dates suit the presumed subject, but the artist is anonymous. Where is Hans Holbein when you need him? The sitter might as well be carved, for ...”

“... only occasion when a Christ figure might be manifesting himself in one of these pieces, he is an unknown old man with ‘long, grey, undistinguished hair’ attending a wedding. Asked if he was invited, he replies: ‘I’m not here to nibble on your fucking salmon.’ Though the pieces are extremely short they aren’t necessarily compressed, if compression ...”

“... Most BBC journalists neither break stories nor see it as their job to do so. It is not unknown for BBC journalists who do want to break new ground to leak their stories to the Times or the Guardian. Once editors see it in print they will be more comfortable broadcasting it. But for all the damage Hutton’s report inflicted, it only accentuated ...”

“... He understood that impressionable archaeologist who, after having cleared the path to as yet unknown tombs and treasures, knocked on the door before entering, and, once inside, fainted with emotion. Beauty dwells in the light and stillness of laboratories: like an expert diver gliding through the water with open eyes, the biologist gazes with relaxed ...”

“... inscrutable means: the ‘midnight carryings off and drownings’, ‘mysterious meetings,/And unknown dooms’ that Marina, wife of the condemned Jacopo in The Two Foscari, laments; or, in English Bards, in a less desperate scenario, the merciless ‘sentences’ handed down by the ‘tyrant’ critics of the Edinburgh Review, a cabal of ...”

“... Monkey Grip, published in 1977, sold well and won a national award in Australia, so she was not unknown, just rejected by the anthologists who anyway preferred poets. When I look at the contents page, I find that, of 38 names listed under ‘Contemporary Writing’, eight are women. Among the male names I do not recognise (my bad), one is a judge-poet and ...”

“... narrating them’. But we are bound to fail: we ‘live our lives in one direction’ (towards an unknown future) and ‘narrate them the other way round’ (as if we knew how they would end). Sartre worked on ‘Melancholia’ for several years, transforming it from an abstract philosophical essay into a well-wrought novella, whose message is built into its ...”

“... points for mail travelling back and forth between Venice and the Papal States, it wasn’t unknown for fistfights to break out between postal workers serving the rival powers. Giovan Antonio’s time behind bars, grim though it must have been, helped to establish the principle that couriers and postmasters should be protected from harassment or ...”

“... 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 ...”