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“... one believes, as a previous generation of critics did, that she must have been in love with some unknown man or woman. Emily’s passion was all inside. Katherine Frank has produced a highly readable study, more about the Brontës than about Emily specifically, which also makes some original suggestions. Did Emily suffer from what would now be called ...”

“... heartless, and also a little stupid, to weigh a literary biography by its poundage of previously unknown embarrassments, affairs or tragedies. In biography, that most voyeuristic of genres, what counts is sympathy and discretion – qualities Boyd displays in abundance – as well as modesty. By admitting that no amount of knowing about the life can explain ...”

“... We may agree that she looks sour, but we should not feel sure that she was meant to. Does the unknown lady in a yellow dress painted by Bronzino (in the Galleria Sabauda, Turin) look ‘prim’, as Campbell claims? I don’t think so. There is more point in arguing about her book, however. Its extremely small size, Campbell conjectures, ‘might he a ...”

“... Empire, to go out and plant cabbages in them. These imperial views matured slowly. Haggard was an unknown, reduced on his return home to reading for the Bar. A career in the divorce courts did not strike him as gentlemanly. What changed his life was the success of Stevenson’s Treasure Island, which he felt he could at least emulate. In idle youthful hours ...”

“... He regrets that ‘ritual was not a tool people can use to investigate or reason about the unknown,’ but is very attracted to its discretion, its enigma. ‘The spaces of rituals created magic zones of mutual affirmation,’ he writes. It’s not so certain, however, that their character inheres in stone, in the type of temple or dwellings where they ...”

“... so expensive that only the Tories can do it effectively. What the poll tax achieved was to drive unknown numbers of potential Labour voters off the register. The quangos are just the latest piece of evidence to add to all the rest. (Who now remembers Sir Derek Rayner’s crusade against quangos in Thatcher’s early years?) The other great driving force ...”

“... snap of him partying with his wife, Lisa, a former bank worker, when their whereabouts were still unknown. But a wretched fax purporting to have been sent from a hotel in Kuala Lumpur at about this time didn’t strike me as the handiwork of some kind of equities top gun. There was a forlorn, beaten aspect about the 28-year-old author’s assertion that he ...”

“... are caveats, of course. Where the culture of the skilled working class had once been is an anomic, unknown Scotland whose grim council-house settlements (Wilsontown, Legbrannock, Newarthill), bereft of their founding mines or factories, sprawl across the central belt from Dalmellington to Tranent. The drug-slugged no-go areas of Irvine Welsh’s Edinburgh make ...”

“... the medical verisimilitude of the dénouement. The resemblance between Ella’s child and the unknown poet, he wrote in 1896, was ‘a physical possibility that may attach to women of imaginative temperament, and that is well supported by the experience of medical men and other observers of such manifestations’. Despite the implication that the artist ...”

“... where the Army cornered them. At least a hundred and fifty Zapatistas died; total casualties are unknown. ‘The soldiers removed their dead the moment they fell. The poor guerrillas were there for days,’ said Eloina, putting a hand to her nose. ‘There was no one to lift them up.’ After the Army took over, Ocosingo locked itself in. Three days passed ...”

“... in the northwest Atlantic,’ he said. ‘We have a total collapse, an ecological catastrophe of unknown proportions.’ As a character in The Shipping News remarks: Jesus! You think it can’t get worse, it gets worse! This business about allocating fish quotas as if they was rows of potatoes you could dig ... They’ve made the inshore fishermen just ...”

“... pinned his bus-tickets to his expenses sheets. But just how hard-up it was was mercifully unknown to me. Above all, I did not know that the company chairman, Laurance Scott – a Scott of Scotts and therefore a man who could be assumed to be committed to the idea of C.P. Scott’s Manchester Guardian – had effectively lost faith in the paper’s ...”

“... in Northern california was arrested for stabbing his wife; he subsequently died in prison ‘of unknown causes’. I do not now remember his name, and in any case no one would have recognised it. His was just one of the many murders followed by a suicide – or attempted suicide – routinely covered by the San Francisco newspapers. But he may serve as an ...”

“... generally. Sheehan’s recounting of these unseemly facts is distressing – not because they are unknown, but because, related in sequence, they reveal a pattern of undemocratic actions that constituted an assault on the foundations of representative government in America. Major-General Edward Lansdale’s secret masterminding of the campaign that gave birth ...”

“... as Miss S. lies in her coffin at his elbow. Finally there is another hymn, this one by the (to me) unknown hymnodist Kevin Norton, who’s obviously reworked it from his unsuccessful entry for the Eurovision Song Contest, and with the young priest acting as lead singer and the congregation a rather subdued backing group, Miss Shepherd is carried out.The ...”