“... his or her own story, and every moderately intelligent and reflective person knows that much is unknown. It is appealing, then, to read Clinton at his moments of confusion and uncertainty, and to find some redeeming value in those evasions and circumlocutions that his enemies sought to present as both absolute moral sins and treasonable crimes of state. The ...”

“... every sort of tax dodge, secret bank account and offshore money haven to cover his tracks but, unknown to Parliament, he was acting as a ‘financial director’ for the sheikh of Dubai when he was an opposition spokesman on foreign affairs – at a time, moreover, when large sums of money were being offered by Gulf rulers to keep a British military ...”

“... hands and ethnic and racial minorities. Most of the writers who signed up to the project were unknown, and would remain so. Others, such as Nelson Algren (the director of its Illinois branch), Conrad Aiken, Saul Bellow and John Cheever, had already begun to make their reputations. Studs Terkel would find his calling when the FWP sent him out onto the ...”

“... male inseminates a female, the rapist’s sperm and his own enter the female together. It is not unknown for males to be raped by other males while in the act of copulating with a female. It isn’t always so violent or so sordid. In Australia, there’s a certain species of wren in which two-thirds of chicks are, so to speak, bastards, fathered by males ...”

“... Town Hall suggested. In other words, it was important for FN voters that their choice go entirely unknown, because it would be seen as shameful, or at least controversial. Mme G told me that she liked to go through the results in the local paper, looking for the very smallest returns, and speculating as to whose grandmother was pitted against whose first ...”

“... a few minutes. He left at the first opportunity, fleeing to California at the expense of an as yet unknown young Canadian admirer called Elizabeth Smart. Smart had read Barker’s poems and fallen in love with their author at a distance, determining in advance to bear him children on the grounds that they ‘would all be wonderful poets’. Her fixation might ...”

“... of text, and authentic archaic spellings, which they could only have found in obscure collections unknown even to many classicists. The problem is that the details don’t quite add up. This is not just a question of all the buildings being set askew, at a very un-Roman angle (fair enough – cameras need to be able to get all-round shots and angle views). It ...”

“... on their way south to the Cape of Good Hope. In that stormy region, 25-metre-high waves are not unknown – ‘walls of water so steep and powerful that they have cracked supertanker hulls like eggshells’ – and in such conditions, Fagan tells us, ‘our small boat’s chances would be better than the tanker’s,’ with the massive waves passing ...”

“... tradition and the shock of the new – and also about the evolving attitudes towards the hitherto unknown peoples of America, as Europeans, and Spaniards in particular, tried to establish criteria for assessing their rational capacity and to find arguments that would justify their domination and exploitation. Columbus’s real and imaginary worlds, and his ...”

“... was lame and exhausted. After resting a few days they set off eastwards, into difficult and unknown country. The Kalapalos reported seeing smoke from their camp fires for five days, and then nothing on the sixth day. They indicated to Dyott, in sign language, their belief that the party had been massacred. Dyott considered it the most likely ...”

“... Koshchey the Deathless (Roman Jakobson estimated that a third of Russian fairy tales were unknown outside the country). Pushkin, Leskov, Platonov, Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinksy, Kandinsky and Chagall drew inspiration from the oral literature polite society had hitherto left in the fields or the kitchen. They were influenced not only by the stories ...”

“... and Fronto themselves, he does not stop to point out that the dates of many of them are either unknown or disputed – that you cannot, for very obvious reasons, simply string them together into a narrative. It is surely the job of all biographers to explain what lies behind their own reconstruction of their subject’s life: biography is always as much ...”

“... in 1895 in a politically charged lecture at Freiburg, ‘the words written over the portal to the unknown future of human history’ are Dante’s lasciate ogni speranza. The lecture formally inaugurated a professorship in political economy that Weber had secured through research that he’d done for what we would now call an influential think tank, the ...”

“... tails to people’s heads, flung impressive-sounding names around, and invented ‘new bones unknown in the European skeleton’. But they also observe that the refusal of Arab doctors to follow modern Western medical science probably ‘saved them the fruitless labour of wading through the ingenious and exploded theories’ fashionable in Europe ...”

“... the rebel enclave. The murder of 85 civilians confirmed by multiple sources and the killing of an unknown number of people with bombs and shells were certainly atrocities. But it remains a gross exaggeration to compare the events in East Aleppo – as journalists and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic did in December – with the mass slaughter of ...”