“... In the first story of the collection, ‘The Twenty-Seventh Man’, Pinchas Pelovits is an unknown writer in Stalinist Russia who has been arrested as a ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ and is imprisoned for anti-Soviet activity along with ‘an eminent selection of Europe’s surviving Yiddish literary community’. Only in fiction can he imagine a ...”

“... There are the bad dreams – ‘She is in an aeroplane that switches direction and lands at an unknown airport; uniformed men with guns are waiting for her at the foot of the gangway; in a cold sweat, she recognises the Czech police’ – which become more terrible still to Irena when she realises that ‘all emigrants’ had them. ‘How could the very ...”

“... 1961 by Jean-Pierre Richard, under the title Pour un Tombeau d’Anatole, they revealed a largely unknown side of Mallarmé, one which even now disturbs the idea of him as the poet of pristine impersonality and detachment. My translation here is based on Bertrand Marchal’s 1998 Pléiade edition of Mallarmé’s Oeuvres complètes. These notes provide a ...”

“... in the plate-tectonic dance). In the process, Fortey and his colleagues revealed a previously unknown ancient sea and struck a blow against those geologists who had put their faith in the magnetic evidence according to which this water should not have existed. In his enjoyable new book, Fortey surveys the current state of knowledge about the Earth, and ...”

“... say, or Mum out shopping, I imagine less speed and more caution at the edges, due to the unknown in the halo of things. The huge effort of invention, or recollection, or both, with which a collective life is animated is Richler’s triumph in these books. With the close focus of a child she has gathered up the details and digressions which add up to ...”

“... has such standing. Ministers have no power bases within the party or the country and are largely unknown to the electorate. They owe their places in the cabinet almost entirely to their relationship with Blair. As far as can be seen by an outsider, the cabinet is largely marginalised. It has no collective spirit, is rarely consulted by the prime ...”

“... and René Olivier. René later claimed that the idea of a pedal-driven two-wheeler came from an unknown workman. At about the same time, a bicycle was developed by a maker of prams and tricycles from Nancy called Pierre Lallement. There is also a faint possibility that the bicycle originated in Scotland, though Herlihy shows this claim to be extremely ...”

“... unconscious, Freud cited the comment one of his patients made after recounting a dream about an unknown woman: ‘Whoever this woman in my dream is, I know she is not my mother.’ A clear proof, for Freud, that the woman was his mother. What better way to characterise the typical patient of today than to imagine his reaction to the same dream: ‘Whoever ...”

“... trained Keats had healed himself, faked his own death and returned to England to work and die unknown among the rural poor under the name of Dr Cake? This scenario is both premise and précis of Andrew Motion’s novella, The Invention of Dr Cake. The action is the deduction of Dr Cake’s secret by the narrator, Dr Tabor. The book is presented in the ...”

“... is a relic of rioting by Muslim mobs who had tried to torch the bar, their petrol supplied by unknown fixers in a ‘dim Mercedes’. As a footnote explains, in Nigeria the Mercedes is a ‘talismanic’ symbol of local Big Men. In 1993 these men were busy organising ‘spontaneous riots’ – against Abiola’s supporters, non-Muslims, opponents of all ...”

“... semen found on Sindall’s body. The results of that analysis proved that the semen belonged to an unknown male. At the 2025 appeal the court again did not address the evidence that led to the initial conviction – the bite marks, the confession, the cell confession. Instead, the judges were keen to justify the failure of the 2021 appeal, stressing the ...”

“... Everyone at a posh soirée is invited to greet and then ignore a ‘totally unknown, totally uninteresting and unnecessary aunt’. Vanity and folly are ubiquitous, stupid people are celebrated as intelligent, intelligent people get lost among their theories or their prejudices. One of our heroes, Nikolai Rostov, is said to have the ...”

“... are equipped with shock absorbers that the poor cannot afford. Peace of mind in the face of an unknown but perilous future is one of the most unfairly distributed of fundamental human goods. Today’s super-rich can buy disaster insurance from private security firms that offer to whisk their clients out of any area lashed by a man-made or natural ...”

“... Hekmatyar and Masud, then fighting a civil war in the centre of Kabul, could be swept aside by an unknown group of madrassah students called the Taliban. Or that the Taliban would, in a few months, conquer 90 per cent of the country, eliminate much corruption, restore security on the roads and host al-Qaida.It is tempting to assume that economic growth will ...”

“... were born in his middle years: Giovanni in 1337 and Francesca in 1343, their mother or mothers unknown. He never married. A curriculum vitae traces a successful public career in the humanist mould: scholar, orator, part-time diplomat, absentee cleric. His coronation as poet laureate, at the age of 37, was only the second such award in Italy since classical ...”