“... she said slowly in French, “is very ill, right now.” ’ And she is perfectly correct. For, unknown to O’Hanlon, his companion, Lary Shaffer, professor of psychology at the State University of Plattsburgh, author of a doctoral thesis on ‘The Predation of Crabs by Lesser Black-Backed Gulls’, has multiple sclerosis. Not only that, he has recovered ...”

“... of authorship are spelt out very clearly: we are shown a writer at work, trying to re-create the unknown inner life of his son, and betraying him through misrepresentation. Similarly, Susan Barton approaches Daniel Foe believing that he will set down her account of life on the island as accurately as possible, only to find that he rewrites it as a myth of ...”

“... territory. Men sometimes returned to the West to tell their tale, but women’s fates were largely unknown. There are exceptions, of course. Readers of the late Lesley Blanch’s lushly unreconstructed chronicle The Wilder Shores of Love will remember Aimée Dubucq de Rivery, cousin of the Empress Josephine, who in 1784 was taken by an Algerian ship in the Bay ...”

“... Parliamentary Party. The opposite is probably true of Michael Portillo. The other candidates are unknown and rather unknowable, though Iain Duncan-Smith, the spear-carrier of Thatcherism, is not what the Conservative Party now needs. There appears, to an outsider, little ideological coherence to the contest. Clarke, a genially tolerant figure and a strong ...”

“... 5 per cent resulted in arrests, 5 per cent are still under investigation, 25 per cent have an unknown outcome and in 65 per cent of cases the police took no further action. Harriet Wistrich, a lawyer at Birnberg Peirce, has taken on many briefs for civil actions. ‘Quite a number of companies have paid up rather than go to trial,’ she says, although ...”

“... up So well but time, chance, change brings something new up, Some lesson. Your known laws become unknown; Things prized, when put to fresh proof, you disown. This is my fate. The hard life that I’ve led Till now I leave, my span of life nigh sped. And why? Because I’ve found, on fact’s own showing The best thing’s to be soft and ...”

“... Revolution and its anti-imperialist ethos was not much known. The United States, too, was an unknown player in international relations, and its record in the Philippines or Latin America – Wilson’s imposition, for instance, of military protectorates on Haiti and Nicaragua – went mostly unexamined. Boosted by a slick propaganda campaign, Wilson ...”

“... single image to hold in mind? Fox’s imagination clings to a Holbein fashion sketch, featuring an unknown woman, ‘elegant, poised and animated. It is not Jane, but it is how she really was.’ To me, Holbein’s model looks bossy, sly and smug. That’s how far the eye of imagination gets you. Jane made her debut in the historical record in 1522, when she ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... finance, it’s strikingly profligate. Mining was the way bitcoin’s original designer, the unknown figure who goes by the name Satoshi Nakamoto, sought to solve the basic problem of any electronic currency: how to make sure that a user doesn’t spend the same unit of currency more than once.1 Since the vast majority of pounds, dollars and euros are ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... an account, according to Malcolm, ‘of man’s restless drive through the ages to illuminate the unknown corners of the earth’ – was published in 1928; his second book was his first novel, Stained Radiance, published in 1930, by which time he had left the RAF for good. He spent what time he could in the British Museum, contributing articles on ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... utter unknowability to the poet and to the mother alike – ‘Part of herself, yet to herself unknown’: the light pathos of her ignorance is darkened by our awareness that to Barbauld the expectant mother’s experience is no less inscrutable. Sometimes, to great effect, it is the poems themselves that don’t seem to work out as planned. The joky poem ...”