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“... restored to the palatial stables of the Earl of Godolphin. In the first Black Stallion book the unknown horse – rescued from a shipwreck by young Alec Ramsey – is the extreme underdog in a match race against two famous rivals, Cyclone and Sun Raider. ‘I still think the Black can beat them,’ Alec avers at the end of Chapter 17. In the following ...”

“... morning of Enlightenment atheism is dead light, and we men and women of knowledge will remain unknown to ourselves for as long as we continue trying to draw sustenance from it. Just as talk of ‘the problem of evil’ usually betrays the presence of marketplace theism, so talk of ‘the problem of the soul’ typically signals an encounter with ...”

“... commonly a will (as our lawyers speak of ‘testamentary disposition’). This was rendered by an unknown Christian, whether a Latin-speaker misunderstanding Greek or a Greek-speaker misinterpreting his own language, testamentum, as if God could die and leave a will, as the none too bright Heracles imagines Zeus might do in ...”

“... Leclerc thought the bones might belong to a species that, uniquely in history and for reasons unknown, had disappeared from the Earth, but his conjecture was widely rejected. Thomas Jefferson put forward the consensus view in 1781, in his Notes on the State of Virginia: ‘Such is the economy of nature, that no instance can be produced of her having ...”

“... Donald Rumsfeld, you could say, has had a remarkable career, stretching from a middle-class upbringing amid wealthier neighbours on the edge of Chicago, through Congress and high office in the Nixon and Ford administrations, including a spell as secretary of defense, a profitable excursion into business, and finally six tumultuous years heading the Pentagon under George W ...”

“... to make it harder. It makes it more likely that we will drift along with our fate, and into the ...”

“... interpretation, but the Treaty of Union belongs to a category of convention hitherto unknown to constitutional jurisprudence. The pretence that Scotland was amalgamated with England in 1707 by way of a measure known as the Act of Union is what might be called a convention of non-recognition; more precisely, it is a near universally unacknowledged ...”

“... that he is plotting to murder her and her children in the same way he has successfully killed unknown numbers of vulnerable women before her. This is the cold heart of Quiet Dell, a story given in advance (it’s there in full on the front jacket flap). In 1930s America the murders were big news, but Phillips makes little of the blood and gore. Unlike the ...”

“... brothers’ satirical fantasy Monday Begins on Saturday. (A grim and gleaming nocturne set in an unknown realm of secret laboratories and installations, Nine Days in One Year is a romantic triangle involving two nuclear scientists, one doomed by his accidental exposure to atomic radiation. Lighter and more subversive, the Strugatsky novel is set at the ...”

“... thing leads to another. Yet by the end it’s fate that has determined the outcome. A previously unknown witness steps forward, the killer makes a mistake, the detective trips up and there on the carpet is the piece of evidence he’s been looking for all along. (Or: De Gaulle ducks at the last moment; the only non-murderer on the train happens to be Hercule ...”

“... by five masked men who were never caught. The men allegedly belonged to a left-wing group that was unknown before the assassination and mysteriously disbanded after it.) In 1993, the Honduran government published the results of an investigation into human rights abuses in the 1980s. The report named 184 people, mainly trade unionists and popular leaders, who ...”

“... was not faulty because it neglected the vagaries of human moods; its mistake was to think that the unknown future could be turned into a set of calculable risks and, in effect, conjured out of existence, which was impossible. Several centuries earlier, Pascal – one of the founders of probability theory – had come to the same conclusion, when in the ...”

“... Obviously there is no direct equivalence between what Ellroy does in these pages and what the unknown psychopath did to Elizabeth Short; nor do his crimes against women – so far as we can tell – seem to have amounted to much more than the derelictions and histrionics that many sick men inflict on women (or indeed, vice versa). Nevertheless, on ...”

“... Galileo: Heretic (1983). Redondi argued, in a brilliant discussion based on a single, previously unknown document he found in the Holy Office archives, that the trial was a cover-up, designed to paper over the much more serious accusation of atomism. Some parts of Redondi’s thesis are mistaken, but the central document, along with another that emerged when ...”

“... in the fourth grade from Liberia.’ There’s also a José and a child named Shi-shi, provenance unknown. Only Reza stands out: ‘He didn’t look like the other children – not because of his olive skin, his fierce little eyebrows, the set of his lip, but because his clothes were so tidy, so formal and foreign.’ Despite his sensitivity and charm, Reza ...”