“... Both Danton and his adversaries frequent brothels and talk luridly of venereal disease. Unknown to the incorruptible Robespierre, one of his associates, suffering from tabes dorsalis, is told that his mistress will pull out his shrivelled spinal cord and dangle it down his back like a pigtail; another’s skin is adorned with ‘rosaries’, a ...”

“... than at a real peach? Why would we (at least sometimes) rather look at a Velázquez portrait of an unknown, very plain person than at a real, pretty human being? And why at a Chardin or a Velázquez rather than paintings of the same subjects by other painters? Reading Baxandall’s book puts up hares of this sort, and suggests ways to chase them by emphasising ...”

“... in-laws. After his death, when Shaw was at university, ‘he left a litany of other lives, each unknown to the other.’ Joking that had she spent more time with her father she might have become a more skilful liar, Shaw says: ‘I’ve always wished I could tell better lies, not thinking of myself as someone very good at it’ – but what a strange thing ...”

“... she is quite prepared to share both these feelings with her husband, then in Australia, and – unknown to his wife – himself on the verge of an entanglement with a young Scottish girl, by whom he was to have a child. ‘Now goodbye for the present dear Ganner,’ she concludes the letter, using her pet name for her husband. ‘What would you do with such ...”

“... only a little more than a decade to grip Macedonia by the throat. Yet it had been virtually unknown before then. Attempts by historians to account for the decisive role played by external forces and Great Power politics in this period have been patchy – which in part explains why research on Macedonian history now appears to be dominated by ...”

“... are familiar from Chapman’s The Celts: The Construction of a Myth (1992), as well as from works unknown to James such as Terence Brown’s Celticism (1996), but James gives them a new polemical slant. The facts, as opposed to the interpretation, seem to be as follows. Classical writers from the time of Herodotus referred to ‘Celts’ in Western and ...”

“... but despite the variety of ingredients found in pills sold as Ecstasy, killer pills are virtually unknown. Very occasionally an individual can react badly to the drug, but dehydration, overheating or excessive/compulsive water drinking are the most common causes of death. Around two million people are using the drug, if only occasionally, and there were 43 ...”

“... sites, as hungry humans push slash-and-burn agriculture ever closer to jungles seething with unknown butterflies. They tell us boys’ own tales of butterfly-chasing in South America – torrential rains, mudslides, sinister border guards. They try to persuade us that lepidoptery is the flagship of entomology (I prefer beetles). They flex their literary ...”

“... years of continuity gave way to significant change in the 1880s. The death in London of the as yet unknown Dr Marx, and the birth of Keynes and Attlee, together with the publication of J.R. Seeley’s Expansion of England – all within the first six months of 1883 – are useful reminders of how the old world was giving way to the new. But was it really the ...”

“... 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 ...”

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

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”