“... propelled into the big league.’ He delighted in a test for Oklahoma! made by Rod Steiger and the unknown James Dean (though Dean could not sing well enough to get the part): he has been very appreciative of Method acting. That is why Montgomery Clift played Private Prewitt – though not an obvious choice as a soldier or a boxer. (He ...”

“... border post between Lithuania and Belorussia where seven Lithuanian border guards were murdered by unknown assailants to the intense embarrassment of Gorbachev. I went there one month after the killings. The Lithuanians showed no reticence in their grief. Men and women cried together at the makeshift shrine behind the shabby border hut where the guards had ...”

“... justification for a strike led by attack helicopters on an arms dump in Mogadishu which left ‘an unknown number’ of Somalis dead. On closer inspection the incident revealed just the kind of queasy anomaly about Operation Restore Hope that saturation media coverage a week or two earlier had failed to expose. The weapons in the dump were impounded after the ...”

“... decisive achievements in all fields are impersonal and their authors are for the most part unknown.’ Le Corbusier’s various urban plans, steadily developed from 1922 onwards into what became known as the Ville Radieuse, incorporated all that Wright detested. In it ‘the discoverer’ proposed an apartment city with a population density of 400 ...”

“... Does it refer to the new baby on the way, or to the young child so rapidly turning into someone unknown to his parents, or to the seemingly demure but menacing nanny hired to look after him? Or is it all a little stranger than that? What does ‘looking after’ mean? Are not the structures and vocabulary of ‘childminding’ a little odder than most? Do ...”

“... Extraordinary though it may seem, the activities of Unit 731 (and related outfits) were virtually unknown to most Japanese at least until 1976, when a Japanese television documentary was made on the subject. And the cat was only truly let out of the bag in 1982, with the publication of The Devil’s Gluttony, a fictionalised account written by Morimura ...”

“... all of them. When his widow died in 1901 three collections of Manning’s documents were sold to unknown buyers and have never surfaced since. However, the other half had been in the hands of the original custodians all along, so most of the materials existed for a major work. One might have expected it to have been undertaken, at the latest, after the ...”

“... When in December 1926 the creator of Hercule Poirot disappeared the creator of Sherlock Holmes somehow possessed himself of one of her gloves, and at once took it to a Mr Horace Leaf with a result which he describes in a letter to the Morning Post, written on 16 December (ten days, that is, after Agatha Christie had vanished), and now reprinted in the present volume of selections from Conan Doyle’s letters to the press ...”

“... in grief is concerned, since our lives may not be at all affected by the deaths of distant and unknown people. But there is something that needs explaining in the altogether unmoved way we seem to be able to view the ‘other-regarding’ element when the victim has no relationship with us. To accept the legitimacy of this question is not the same as ...”

“... them derived from, or at any rate parallel to, those known from the New Testament, others hitherto unknown and including a few which may well be ancient: while unmistakably Gnostic, it thus has closer links than any of the other new texts with the canonical Gospels, but even here there is practically no narrative, no interest in what happened or what was ...”

“... from Scaliger to John Ashbery. Modern critical writing, too, is strongly represented, much of it unknown to me. I am used to the citation of books I have never read, but the very copious notes to Kinds of Literature refer again and again to scholarly works, apparently of great interest that I have never even heard of. Fowler’s learning shows itself in his ...”

“... on its own written to his agent. What could it mean? Something sporting or a literary reference unknown to me? My eventual guess is here confirmed and I can remove the ‘perhaps’ in the footnote: Rex Mottram in Brideshead Revisited gives Charles Ryder a meal in Paris which started as saddle of hare and became pressed duck, ‘to allow’, Davis ...”

“... Derek Ezra, Chairman of the National Coal Board, at a social gathering, and said to him, entirely unknown to Laurence Daley or the Executive: ‘The figure you will have to settle at is in the region of three and a half quid’ (representing about 15 per cent). From 1 November an overtime ban was imposed, with the expectation that production would be reduced ...”

“... cake and eating it. Until we can be shown some criteria by which we may decide whether a hitherto unknown figure should be classified as a ‘Humanist’ or not, we should perhaps refrain from using the word at all. Such criteria Dr Fox has lamentably failed to supply. Dr Guy’s half of the book is concerned with the Henrician age from the Reformation ...”

“... as at present constituted) or it might be Gloria Steinem. We, who tolerate limitations on freedom unknown to Americans, might feel a bit embarrassed about some of the consequences. Pondering Steinem’s ideals, Amis asks: ‘Would I want to be a writer in a feminist utopia? Would anybody? Wouldn’t it encourage the general thirst for ready-made or ...”