“... there’s a something in this breast’), he breaks out of his stale existence and makes for the unknown satisfactions of the West. Against all expectations, including his own, it looks as though he might succeed. The last story, ‘The Management of Grief’, shows how the bereavements of our dissonant world can create room for opportunities, albeit bleak ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for the crime, that I had a dreadful guilty secret that I would henceforth carry with me unknown to myself for thirty years.’ It is, or so Allon came to believe, this secret – whatever it stood for, whatever crouched behind it – that would have found a way, one day, of writing itself, in defiance of the distance that writing was meant to ...”

“... to a child of ten. (I was six weeks older.) But I couldn’t get across the notion of x as an unknown, because he knew, stubborn little kabbalist, that x was 24. He would have burned me at the stake if he’d been allowed to play with matches. In traditional cosmology, the math stays simple, but may be elaborate. Yin and yang are the archetypes of every ...”

“... volatile nature of things before they congeal, of the tenuousness and vulnerability of all things, unknown to those with a common binary vision who saw the world of a piece, with a seamless skin like the skin of a sausage holding things together. My right eye removed the skin of the visible world.’ The imagery of excoriation is also appropriate to Audrey’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... had intended to be ‘a new Deutschland, where synagogues shall be forbidden, and Bourses unknown’, as the Times put it. What Macintyre found was a remnant, poorer than their grandparents had been in the economic depression in Saxony itself in the 1880s, people who had never learnt, Schubert explained, to manage the soil or raise animals for the ...”

“... locally recruited, are included, the conservative estimate is 130,000. This figure excludes the unknown number of members of the Wehrmacht who killed Jews; a reading of Omer Bartov’s book suggests that the majority at one time or another, for one reason or another (or without any reason at all), did: just as there were millions of individual deaths, so ...”

“... remain. So do at least some of the mentalities, including ‘an easy-going sociability that is unknown in the West,’ as Darnton puts it. Time, as I can confirm, is not yet an object in those parts. But, for better or worse, East Europeans are trying to pick up where they left off before Communism intervened. For better in Leningrad, where at least the ...”

“... he was also changed by what he suffered. On a transforming voyage, a journey into the fearsome unknown, he was shaken by contact, in heightened perceptions and aroused emotions, with environments previously unexperienced or unrecorded. From Grafton – for all his skill as a pen-portraitist – the reader could never guess how Las Casas was warped by his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”