“... Fitzgerald in effect has blessed this effort. In the last year or two of his life, for reasons unknown, he scribbled a rough outline of The Great Gatsby in the back of a copy of André Malraux’s novel Man’s Hope – nine entries for the nine chapters of the book, which Churchwell adopts for the same purpose. ‘I, Glamour of Rumsies and Hitchcoks’ is ...”

“... cycles of the moon, but counting months and years has no meaning for them. Birthdays and age are unknown concepts. Life for them unfolds mainly in the present; only in the present can their daily needs be fulfilled.’ By the time he found them, all but a few hundred of the former nomads were living in permanent settlements, in longhouses connected by track ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... other fluids not visible to the naked eye. ‘In one motel, the purple beam had picked up so much unknown DNA off the pillowcases, blankets and sheets that the bed turned psychedelic.’Meanwhile, the undertaker Royal Davis encourages his reluctant school-age son to hand out business cards at scenes of trauma. Royal is a ‘freelance mortician’, two words ...”

“... his own fate as mixed: ‘My Cid shrugged and shook his head.’The exact date and place are unknown, but Rodrigo Díaz was probably born in the mid-to-late 1040s, to an aristocratic Castilian family in the village of Vivar, near Burgos. There are no representations from the time of what he looked like. In the sources he goes by multiple names ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... reluctantly to marry, was the most ‘depressed’ of them all. Why, as Roger Poole asks in The Unknown Virginia Woolf, didn’t he get straight back on the boat to Ceylon after receiving the letter in which she just about accepted his proposal? In her review of Quentin Bell’s 1972 biography, ‘Mrs Virginia Woolf – a Madwoman and Her Nurse’, Cynthia ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that he inspired bin Laden; it is known that he aroused the jealousy of Zawahiri. What remains unknown to this day is who was responsible for his assassination in Peshawar in 1989. The murder of Azzam – who, with bin Laden’s financial support, turned the international effort to defeat the Soviet invaders in Afghanistan into a pan-Islamic jihad ...”