“... disease. But the fact is that weak health systems, not unprecedented virulence or a previously unknown mode of transmission, are to blame for Ebola’s rapid spread. Weak health systems are also to blame for the high case-fatality rates in the current pandemic, which is caused by the Zaire strain of the virus. The obverse of this fact – and it is a fact ...”

“... retrospectively or otherwise. But it’s harder still to believe that Lambert’s actions were unknown to senior officers, his handler at the very least. Lambert led two lives. In one, he was a policeman with a wife and children in suburban Herefordshire. In the other, he was an activist in London involved in multiple long-term sexual ...”

“... was becoming so fashionable that Sartre had to hire a secretary. No longer a beginner, no longer unknown, Beauvoir had nothing to prove; she could write about anything. She decided to write about herself. She was inspired by Michel Leiris’s Manhood, which had just been reissued in Paris with a new introduction comparing writing to bullfighting (the torero ...”

“... form. According to Marías, no other type of narrative can do as much justice to the unrealised or unknown and therefore invisible part of life. ‘The genre of the novel’, he argues, is uniquely able to show ‘that what was is also of a piece with what was not’. It goes without saying that what never happened is available only to reflection, not to ...”

“... in the Cambridge apartment of Alice Methfessel, the partner of her final years. Still dark. The unknown bird sits on his usual branch. The little dog next door barks in his sleep inquiringly, just once. Perhaps in his sleep, too, the bird inquires once or twice, quavering. Questions – if that is what they are – answered directly, simply, by day ...”

“... outside Andhra Pradesh. His gandharva ends the story by soaring off into the sky, destination unknown, calling out to his perplexed English captors that he’d never seen a ‘more childish race’. It’s a subtle piece of work, but Satyanarayana’s version of the encounter between the West and the non-West has nearly been lost to us. The fame that ...”

“... Men, and then, in 2001, Princess of Thieves, starring Keira Knightley as Gwyn, the (previously unknown) daughter of Robin and Marian, who rescues her father and his no longer so merry men from the enemies of Prince Philip, ‘a son of King Richard I unknown to history’, as Knight puts it. But Marian could also be ...”

“... wrote to Thomas Mann after she became his English translator. She was, she said later, an ‘unknown instrument … which … must … serve him to change the garment of his art into a better one which might clothe her for the marketplace until times changed’. ‘Like a lady’s maid,’ Briggs writes, before adding: ‘I know nothing, really, about ...”

“... By the end of the year, 17 security personnel had been killed. The number of civilian deaths is unknown but generally put ‘in the dozens’. In his New Year speech, Biya – now in his mid-eighties – appointed several new Anglophone ministers to his cabinet, but that was all. By the end of January, with the Ambazonian government-in-exile detained by the ...”

“... Grimani. Whether he commissioned them from Bosch – whether Bosch ever went to Italy – is unknown. They could have been bought on the open market: Bosch soon became an international property. What the panels depicted was clear, or roughly so (with the accent on roughly). One connoisseur in the 1520s, visiting the cardinal’s collection, produced the ...”

“... together six days later, is now 32. Aged 24, they witnessed the country take a lurch into the unknown, with a referendum result delivered largely by the over-50s. Johnson took over when they were 27, and less than a year later the country was staggering through lockdowns, with an overwhelmed NHS and an economy dependent on central bank financing of a ...”

“... Casimir Funk’s 1912 hypothesis on vitamins), and the chemical composition of Swiss soil was unknown. Despite this, almost everything Hunziker argued turned out to be true.Iodine was discovered in 1811, and by the time Hunziker gave his speech to the Zurichsee Doctors’ Society, it was used in a bewildering variety of treatments, from cough medicines to ...”

“... TV through the night and becomes increasingly obsessed with his favourite show, Parts Unknown, hosted by the chef Anthony Bourdain. He sensed he had found another kindred spirit. ‘I felt a sense of recognition in this guy wandering around the world, trying to find some temporary connection with other human beings living within their own ...”

“... and did not deserve to survive. ‘We have to abdicate,’ he continued, ‘and the Great Unknown, he or it, lurking behind Fate, will one day repeat such an experiment with another race.’ In an extraordinary gesture of radical self-abnegation – not the type of gesture for which he is best known – Freud was willing to sacrifice humanity, as we ...”

“... the Ballyshannon Herald in 1843 that ‘“IT” is the onely propper pronoun to be applied to an unknown correspondent – the name being neither fish, flesh, nor fowl.’) Fully authorised by the general etymon or not, few have been taken with the idea of allowing ‘it’ to stand in for humans, at least adult ones. ‘It’ was once commonly used for ...”