“... roasting everyone in town except for her and Ethel and an old opal miner. A tiny group, fate unknown behind the smoke, is making a dash for Brisbane and freedom in a stolen Land Rover. This is major drama. A change of wind and our threesome in town may be incinerated too. And what does the eager reader get? Jess’s untimely meditations on the art of ...”

“... you want to ‘share’. But if you have a syndrome, you have an audience, and if its causes are unknown, you have a mission – to find out what they are – which can enlist the sympathy and attention of medical practitioners. A syndrome offers those who may be having a hard time the validation of the victim’s role. Validation seems to be the key here ...”

“... profession. Paper wars litter the medical history of earlier centuries, and real duels were not unknown (two Jamaican doctors managed to slay each other at ten paces in the 18th century). Prima facie, this occupational violence runs against all expectation. For wasn’t medicine a ‘profession’? And haven’t sociologists been telling us all these years ...”

“... always have in sight the yellow dayglo X marked on his back. The blizzard made our neighbourhood unknown. We could neither see behind us nor before. We felt in that white-out world we were alone looking for landmarks, lost, until we saw the unmistakable MacDonald’s M with its ‘60 billion served’ hamburger count. Living, we were numbered among them, and ...”

“... Newtonian gravitational theory speculated that the perturbations might be produced by a hitherto unknown planet, and their theory-based calculations told them where to point their telescopes. In much the same way, mathematical models of developmental processes can guide molecular biologists as they deploy powerful tools in the search for particular kinds of ...”

“... black wool as for a warm pall, one introducing, introducing continuously to the unknown, the other scrutinising the cheery and foolish faces with unconcerned old eyes. Avel Old knitter of black wool,’ he continues. ‘Morituri te salutant. Not many of those she looked at ever saw her again – not half, by a long way.’ Door of ...”

“... the strange, labyrinthine rock-churches, hewn out about eight hundred years ago by workmen still unknown. On the night before my return to Addis, and thence to Europe, I sat in a house in the friendly, dirt-poor village. It belonged to the family of my guide for the day, a cheerful, intelligent, devoutly Christian young man in his early twenties called ...”

“... Grandfather impregnated a Berber maid and allowed her to be cast off; so his son has an unknown indigène sibling. And at one point Sagesse discovers that her father, who turns out to be a womaniser, has left Etienne in a dark lift in order to go to bed with a woman he has picked up. But the curse on the family is not just a matter of inherited ...”

“... by means of her hoax, she has established that a known author gets more respect than an unknown. Well, thanks for telling us. She also wanted to help these said unknowns by demonstrating that even somebody as gifted as herself could, when rendered nameless, be treated with institutional disdain. And, as if all this were not sufficiently ...”

“... the musicological evidence); while the C major, beloved by Britten, is a fairly recent discovery, unknown at the time when the scholars said the D major was Kraft’s. Now, how can one, in the circumstances, report the Rostropovich-Britten recording of ‘a Haydn concerto’? The interest of the occasion depends on our knowledge of the work recorded – which ...”

“... if sense is based on reference, intelligible hypotheses cannot reach quite so far into the unknown. But what is reference? When someone uses the word ‘cat’, we do not doubt that we know the kind of thing to which he refers. But what focuses his reference onto that particular species? Nothing, Putnam argues, within the microcosm of the speaker’s ...”

“... Certainly in Ben Jonson’s England such a secular experimental attitude to ethics was virtually unknown. This seems to mean that Gunn’s sympathies with any period before the Enlightenment can never be more than skin-deep. Clive Wilmer calls Gunn ‘this most chaste of modern poets’. He does not have in mind Gunn’s subject-matter (though let’s be ...”

“... several countries there was fought what is still, to most people in Britain and America, a quite unknown war in which ordinary people, of their own free will, endured hunger, cold, torture and death to rid themselves not just of foreign occupation but of the whole root and branch, the causes and the effects, of fascist ideology. As Mr Davidson says, ‘the ...”

“... the first time (at Memel in April 1807). The Tsar was impressed by the forthright views of this unknown soldier, and sent his personal surgeon to tend his wounds. After the fresh disaster at Friedland in June, Barclay pressed a strategic plan for the defeated Russians to retreat deep into Russia and thus lure on the French to over-extended ...”

“... the cataract surgeons, the subjects’ private lives are either inviolate, or uninteresting, or unknown (save as may be fallibly deduced from ‘He was unmarried’). The second, smaller class consists mainly of those in the creative arts whose careers stickily attract phrases like ‘he never married, being a homosexual,’ ‘not always ...”