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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... decided he needed ‘a bait’ of it: Everybody in South Carolina knew that blacks, for reasons unknown, fancied clay … The eating took place in a bedroom, for the galvanised bucket of clay was kept under the bed, for the cool. It was blue clay from a creek, the consistency of slightly gritty ice cream. It lay smooth and delicious-looking in its pail of ...”

“... and strange not that long ago, it turns out: it is not known who proposed the tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey, and many were doubtful about the prospect (not British enough, or Protestant). But the process went ahead, with much ritual: bags of bones from four unidentified victims of the battlefield were placed on a table; then, at ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... revealed how the tension was affecting her by banishing me from the television station for some unknown crime on the night of the 15th. Although Saad was profuse in apology the next morning, when the bombing began the television station was top of my hit list. I had also developed an aversion to the airport, as a result of repeatedly filming dignitaries ...”

“... Such wind and weather to the end) Neither becalm’d, nor over-blown, Life’s voyage to the world unknown. Matthew Green, ‘The ...”

“... to a national conference of experts the following year was leaked to the West ‘by means unknown to me’, and appeared without attribution in the Washington Post. In those fading days of the Brezhnev regime, when it was acceptable to criticise constructively the problems of the system ‘within the family’ but not in front of outsiders, she and ...”

“... an abyss of religious ignorance, and suggests that there may have been many others, now as then unknown, whom the essential Christian message never reached, either through the Catholic liturgy or by Protestant evangelism. For Duffy, it is indicative of the extraordinary didactic power of the religious plays, and the disastrous catechetical consequences of ...”

“... is universally understood: right-wing parades go down the Champs Elysées, from the tomb of the unknown soldier towards the Jardin des Tuileries and the Louvre; left-wing parades stretch from the site of the Bastille to the Place de la République. Each side has its heroes. Some of these are more or less invented, like the Revolution’s martyred ...”

“... personality, intentionality and the unity of the subject. ‘The interviewer had to be a complete unknown,’ Salusinszky says, ‘in order to become a transparent cipher for the thoughts of the interviewees.’ This is fine, and shows an awareness of the potential difficulties, but it bears little relation to Salusinszky’s practice in the book. At one ...”

“... of his home and heritage to the source of his own history in the South. He leaps into the unknown too and discovers that ‘if you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.’ With each of these novels, Toni Morrison has been inching her way back beyond 20th-century experiencing of racism, poverty and injustice towards its origins in the history of ...”

“... In 1967 Enid Starkie prefaced her two-volume account with a portrait of ‘Gustave Flaubert by an unknown painter’ – thereby managing to rip off his entire face in one go, since the picture was in fact of Louis Bouilhet. Sartre was less of an impression-taker, more an imposer. In L’Idiot de la Famille he seared the novelist with a terrifying theoretical ...”

“... in the career of Robert Morrison, the early 19th-century pioneer of British Sinology, and is not unknown today. Foucquet’s heart is, like St Jerome’s, in his library – but the saint had a more tractable companion. His hiring of John Hu, a catechist and gate-keeper at the Jesuit’s Canton mission, was a last-minute expedient to outwit his ...”