“... warriors; during the 1970s, female explorers, daring their way two by two through the harsh unknown. Then and now, there are also would-be male allies ultimately left behind: in Midnight Salvage (1999) a real young man in a wheelchair whom Rich dated in college; in Tonight, an imaginary friend from Rich’s childhood with the unlikely name Axel ...”

“... and Petrarch with Sophia. Whether she knew she was pregnant before Foscolo returned to Italy is unknown, but they never met again. In due course the Hamiltons were released and the child was born. Foscolo never had another. Back in Milan, he began Dei sepolcri. Above all it is a political and patriotic poem. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, how to ...”

“... by Erik the Red just over a thousand years ago when he ventured west of Iceland and discovered an unknown coast. His son Leif went for education to Norway and disgusted Erik by bringing back the Christian religion. Later Leif, like his father, set off westwards and founded a short-lived settlement on an even more distant shore where trees ...”

“... of unpublished papyri, and you never know what you may find . . . Your new papyrus may offer you unknown Greek poetry; it may offer unique evidence for the inflation of donkey prices at the height of the Roman Empire.’ City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish is driven by Parsons’s own irrepressible pleasure in the discovery of the details of individual lives in ...”

“... Santos-Dumont’, which could be flown by filling it with coal gas. Now he is virtually unknown, except in Brazil where, according to Hoffman, he is a household name, and the Wright Brothers are regarded as a pair of thunder-stealers. The main reason Santos-Dumont has been forgotten, of course, is that the lighter-than-air flight he pioneered turned ...”

“... warming. The accumulation of greenhouse gases has raised temperatures on a scale and at a pace unknown since the 14th century and perhaps since the end of the last Ice Age. Climate modellers expect further warming in the future, causing more severe coastal floods as ocean levels rise and increasing the incidence of malaria as mosquitoes extend their ...”

“... all the Labour front bench lost their seats. By the end of 1931 Cripps, having been virtually unknown in the Party a year earlier, was one of its leading figures. He thus never had, as Clarke writes, ‘the apprenticeship in Labour politics that might have given a 40-year-old lawyer, however brilliant in his own field, the time and experience necessary in ...”

“... of how the secret services faked Diana’s Paris car crash to cover up her murder, by persons unknown, at Balmoral. The body was then given to Callan to dispose of, which he did by lugging it round the prehistoric stone circles of Grampian region as it decomposed. As well as reading books and generating pornography, Callum/Alan has set himself the task of ...”

“... in a modern statesman which in former ages, even under the most absolute government was utterly unknown. The truth of this remark will appear upon reflecting on the force of some states, at present in Europe, where the sovereign power is extremely limited, in every arbitrary exercise of it, and where at the same time, it is found to operate over the wealth ...”

“... it was Home after all, but at least it was not home. What happiness to fling oneself into the unknown, cleansed of history, family, friends and possessions (except Bill Dolphin’s violin). How fortunate that in the real world, the one in which I was to make my brilliant career, my father did not exist and I was not his daughter. But a year later, when he ...”

“... uprooted millions of Africans, costs European taxpayers a fortune in subsidies and is causing unknown damage to our metabolisms and those of our ...”

“... sent to the Italian police in March 2003 which claimed that Omar ‘may have travelled’ to ‘an unknown country in the Balkans’. This (vague) false trail may have encouraged the police not to take too much trouble over the investigation. The case went cold, in part because the judge then in charge of it, Stefano Dambruoso, requested mobile phone records ...”

“... but the pleasure craft whose masts now bristle and clink in the marinas around the harbour were unknown. Portsmouth certainly meant the dockyard (not yet ‘historic’), the city’s main employer until the 1970s. My father’s last job before retirement was as a fitter for Hampshire Engineering, a small maintenance firm contracted to the naval ...”

“... as if these people are looking for much improvement or change in their lives. Faced with the unknown, they are more likely to retreat than found a start-up. They need looking after. This means that the necessities of life – health, energy, housing – must remain affordable, and threats must be kept at bay. The role of the state is not to initiate or ...”

“... for a liver transplant, I read in one of the obits. She’d been living for decades with an unknown virus, only identified in the late 1980s as hepatitis C. In 1993, I remember, Liz had pressed her proof copy of Trainspotting on me. She recognised immediately that it was ‘a show-stopper’, and when I read it, I agreed. I’d read one of the stories ...”