“... disappears.’ Remarking that ‘we usually associate the national spirit with the sublime’ – unknown soldiers, torn flags and the rest – Moretti observes that what makes a nation laugh is more distinctive than what makes it cry, where ‘the same sublime objects reappear relentlessly from one culture to another.’ Comedy differentiates. ‘All sublime ...”

“... for the crime, that I had a dreadful guilty secret that I would henceforth carry with me unknown to myself for thirty years. And like the scene of seduction in Freud, the truth or falsehood of the matter was utterly irrelevant.The third element in Carol’s death was the childhood puzzle of death itself and my unresolved mourning for her ...”

“... wrecking operation (‘The result … is that the world remains not only unchanged but also unknown. What is more, they invite us to celebrate such impotence at this hecatomb of all previous interpretations’). How, we used to wonder, did this anti-Foucault vehemence play out in the senior common room, given that Sussex in the 1980s was one of the main ...”

“... I ends: ‘Meanwhile, in 1844, a report was received that in North America a disease, hitherto unknown, had attacked the potato crop.’) Her tone is English to the core, a cross between Margaret Thatcher and A.S. Byatt: she knows the difference between right and wrong (a matter which is still hotly debated in Ireland), and she knows a bad man when she ...”

“... unsuccessfully – was Gertrude Stein. (She died four months later.) In 1951, aided by unknown accomplices ‘dressed as nuns’, Faÿ escaped from prison and fled to safety in Switzerland. Some Stein scholars believe the Catholic Church engineered the escape. Toklas seems to have helped to finance it, purportedly by selling one or several Picasso ...”

“... Ben Ali but also ended the monopoly of the old ruling party. The Tunisians have entered the unknown. Whether they have the resources to cope with the Islamist movement may be their greatest test. The recent elections suggest they are coping pretty well. Libya was part of the wider ‘Arab awakening’ in two respects. The unrest began on 15 ...”

“... one or two things happened: a very good story came in from a guy called Jim Crace. He was just an unknown chap who came from Birmingham or somewhere. Another story came in unsolicited from someone called Ian McEwan. There did seem to be these gifted people out there, so we were up and running. People I knew about, like you and Edna O’Brien, were also in the ...”

“... was under way. In those naive days the propaganda pay-off from names like Enduring Freedom was unknown, or spurned as unmilitary: Attleboro is a quiet town in Massachusetts. Sharp at 6 a.m. I was airborne for War Zone C (‘no shows’, it was said, were listed on a giant computer in Washington and never flew by US Army helicopter again), following the ...”

“... by the CIA at the Stare Kiejkuty intelligence base, Europe’s own Baghram – facilities unknown in the time of Jaruzelski’s martial law. In Romania, a military base north of Constanza performed the same services, under the superintendence of the country’s current president, the staunchly pro-Western Traian Basescu. In Bosnia, six Algerians were ...”

“... there was an attempted coup against Erdoğan’s government. Nearly two years on, much is still unknown about the events of that day. We do know that 249 Turkish citizens were killed in a night of unprecedented violence on the streets of Istanbul and Ankara, as land forces in army trucks and tanks took up position on Istanbul’s main bridges and F-16s ...”

“... There’s something unsettling about it, though, just as there is about a later image (artist unknown), which shows Charlotte at work on a manuscript while Patrick looks on benignly. Gaskell’s warm welcome is more convincing: there is no report of Patrick ever watching his daughters work; he retired to his study in the evenings. It is uncanny, when one ...”

“... undertaken by Guevara, which the Cubans happened to support.The details of the Congo war, unknown five years ago, receive a lot of attention in the biographies, and make depressing reading. As Ben Bella pointed out to Castañeda, the Cubans arrived too late. There was a real possibility of success for the Congolese liberation struggle in 1964. By ...”

“... to think. The sea, the goodies, the elves, are in the West (of course), a face in profile. The unknown regions and the land of shadow are at the back of the head, in the East.Thinking about those maps makes you realise how spatial and spreading The Lord of the Rings is – it’s not temporal and plot-driven like most junk fiction. There’s a whole little ...”

“... a large share in Gaumont-British, but he hadn’t been prepared to take the risk of moving into unknown territory. Within his familiar trade he had done reasonably well in a modest way, owning two or three shops, moving upwards domestically, ensuring that his children were educated: Monty was taught to play the cello; my mother learned the piano, painted ...”

“... bail-out in October 2008 (£17 billion) and then another bail-out in March this year (cost as yet unknown), after it became clear just how badly the HBOS merger had affected Lloyds’s balance sheet. So the failure of HBOS has dragged Lloyds down and in turn dragged down the taxpayer, and is another thing we will be paying for for years and perhaps decades to ...”