“... do with Islam. Fired up by the promises of perestroika, the students felt the parachuting in of an unknown Russian was an affront to their national pride as well as a blow to their own ambitions. The car taking Nazarbayev to work the next morning was surrounded by hundreds of young protesters. He tried to calm them, but without success. Gennady Kolbin, the new ...”

“... of Guantánamo. It is entirely by accident that we have come to see what probably remains unknown to most Americans. One young American citizen, Syed Fahad Hashmi, was due to stand trial this month in Manhattan. He has been subjected to every coercive and unconstitutional practice at issue in the still outstanding extraditions in the three years since ...”

“... nothing like factory work to make a soul appreciate the outdoors, even in its humblest forms. Unknown to me, the Zealous Chargehand – I forget his name, but he lives on as a type, like the Prodigal Son, or the Unfaithful Servant – had secretly cut his own copies of all the keys, including the key to the fan, so when he came along and found the fan ...”

“... often inconclusive: it was cloth, or paper fibres bound with egg-white – or it was a substance unknown. In its most detectable form it consisted of yards of fine muslin packed within the medium’s capacious undergarments, or possibly within the medium’s capacious body cavities. It was often suggested that the muslin was regurgitated, and it was ...”

“... of other people and was used to being heard. Yet in this other life my voice had been literally unknown.’ She concludes by asking us to believe that ‘as we drove down the Mall’ on the way to Buckingham Palace, she decided to write Speaking for Myself. I can’t help feeling, after reading 400-odd pages of her memoir, that I still haven’t heard her ...”

“... The aerial travelling shots associate the flying balloon with the movie camera, two machines unknown in the medieval world, as if to announce at the outset that this picture of a historical moment, as Tarkovsky said while at work on the script, is to be watched with the eyes of today. The peasant inventor who defies received ideas and takes off in his ...”

“... her, ‘do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied.’ In an epilogue, Lucy writes Paul’s deathbed story, worthy of a Victorian novel in its clinical detail and its poignant sentimentality. I can imagine ...”

“... and an exciting one. Cryptic posts displaying a strange design and a message in an unknown script have appeared on the internet, resisting all the efforts of the government lexicology lab (I really want there to be such a thing) to decode it. The design and the message are even reproduced on the back of the title page – the image resembles a ...”

“... earlier.To read Penman doing this in what feels like another moment of passage into something unknown and frightening is rather eerie. He himself has an eye for the media-uncanny. The autobiography flits between his itinerant childhood (his parents bought the family’s first colour TV just in time to watch the spectacle of the Black September atrocity at ...”

“... Park won him the part of Michael Corleone, despite Paramount’s jitteriness about casting an unknown. The studio, which was also reluctant to cast Robert Duvall and Brando, wanted many actors more than they wanted Pacino. ‘They wanted Jack Nicholson. They wanted Robert Redford. They wanted Warren Beatty or Ryan O’Neal.’ Imagine The Godfather with ...”

“... the crowd of eyes; and its shame is permanent, its openness an ever possible vulnerability to some unknown consciousness which is not an entity and can never really be reached by us in any active way. Knausgaard’s achievement is to have foregrounded this immeasurably strange relationship which is there all the time but to which we so rarely attend ...”

“... entered the race to replace him as the member for Holborn and St Pancras. He was a political unknown in a crowded field, facing past and present leaders of Camden Council as well as a popular local doctor. He drank ‘literally hundreds’ of coffees with local members and was, in his own words, ‘ruthlessly focused’ on their concerns. His speech at ...”

“... intelligentsia came together, at a time when both seemed to have all but disappeared. Virtually unknown outside the country, and little registered within it, he was a scholar of comparative religion and an anatomist of the aftermath of the USSR who joined political integrity and intellectual originality in a body of work that addressed the fate of his ...”

“... Paratroopers, easily recognised by their distinctive red berets, stationed with FN rifles. This, unknown to the demonstrators, was a part of Colonel Wilford’s mass IRA lift operation; the Paratroopers belonged to the 1st Battalion of the Paratroop Regiment.These soldiers had arrived by Army trucks in Derry that morning; the battalion had never been in ...”

“... at eight, from the camp. I’ve been wondering why, when you came to transform your own life in an unknown place, hiding out among the hostile peasants, you decided to imagine a girl as the survivor of this ordeal. And did it occur to you ever not to fictionalise this material but to present your experiences as you remember them, to write a survivor’s tale ...”