“... 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 ...”

“... cash to pay the rent and was found wandering in King’s Cross Station, where he ended up in the unknown strays department with no money. His wife and daughter came to visit him. He didn’t remember them but said they seemed very nice. So our plan was out and I found myself dumped by a man for his wife. The other result was that he became the amnesiac ...”

“... it’s over.11 June. For years now I’ve been periodically sent odd press cuttings by someone unknown to me, his name and the note that accompanies them almost illegible. I take it I’m not the only beneficiary of this bounty, which must be quite costly in time and postage and indeed papers. Not that the cuttings are those one particularly wants to ...”

“... moving accident is not my trade.’ He entertains the idea of providential election by unknown powers, but finds his truest subject-matter in perplexity and strangeness and unaccommodated surprise. In short, he feels modern. Where Southey and Wordsworth do overlap, without coinciding exactly, is in the love-hate relationship their poems have with ...”

“... in the diary and his fate – like his first name, which Klemperer neglected to record – is unknown. Richter’s greatest gift to Klemperer was not understanding and friendship but the suggestion that at the right moment he must remove himself – escape, go into hiding. Something in Klemperer’s character makes this almost unthinkable. Even in the ...”

“... The frontispiece to this biographical study is an unknown photographer’s portrait of the bearded Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) taken in about 1872. He sits awkwardly hunched on a crate with his back against a sequoia, grimly frowning into the distance, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a rumpled three-piece suit. His ragged trouser hems are prominent in the foreground, along with his muddy wrinkled boots ...”

“... but freedom of the will does not exist, for a will that aims at its own freedom aims at the unknown.’ With Arthur’s sons portrayed as solitary strivers, schematically exploring the possibilities offered by Faith, Money and Art, it’s permissible to echo Bonpland’s words when Humboldt kept his gaze away from the eclipse: ‘Did one always have to ...”