“... after the bizarre Pepper Scandal: working alone in the Ministry one night, he was attacked by an unknown assailant. Quisling himself refused to shed light on the attacker’s identity until 1945, when he claimed he had thwarted an act of espionage. Others suspected him of being mixed up in a love affair with the office cleaner and a jealous husband. For a ...”

“... Year revellers attempted to surprise him with his family in January 1400; the following Christmas, unknown hands tried to poison his food. There were plans to smear the King’s saddle with a poisonous ointment, so that he would swell up and die, and there was consternation when an ingenious iron man-trap was discovered in the royal bed. Such domestic ...”

“... compositions, he accuses Cassandra Austen of censorship because she was seen to destroy an unknown number of her sister’s letters after her death. However, he himself advances the reasonable hypothesis that what Cassandra, not dishonourably, destroyed referred to the death of her own fiancé, and points out that what seem gaps in the sequence of the ...”

“... a peopled landscape. Metrically inventive and various, these poems are remarkably alive to ‘the unknown thing beside us’: they listen for ‘the due sound’, and, as if watching birds, register ‘the timed flight of words’. A motto for reading Middleton’s work might be: purify the source, then trust to luck. As in ‘The Prose of Walking Back to ...”

“... territory previously charted (sometimes by themselves), rather than on setting off for the unknown. But the territory now looks much broader – and more full of pitfalls – than it did even ten years ago, and is more or less unrecognisable as the terrain explored by Bentham and Mill. The view that utility consists in pleasure and the absence of ...”

“... the Fringe only two of the four writer-performers were ex-Footlights; TW3 was largely cast from unknown faces in Spotlight; and Monty Python was an ex-Cambridge cum ex-Oxbridge combination put together at the BBC after its respective contributors had graduated through several other television shows each. But such facts, as Mr Hewison sighingly concedes, are ...”

“... with the evacuation and forced march of the prisoners away from the Russian advance towards an unknown destination. Three of these sections are concerned with journeys, but it is only the last that takes us away from base-camp. The isolatable escape-story in Part Three trades very skilfully on a whole lot of familiar anxieties, anticipations and ...”

“... he let himself be put on the defensive or feel obliged to try to justify his work in terms of the unknown directions which literature might take once the revolution had taken place? Why did he not simply say merde to his Maoist critics? Perhaps one should not try to explain Sartre’s readiness to be manipulated entirely in terms of his declining health. His ...”

“... German spy who misunderstood Wodehouse and landed in Britain wearing spats – accessories almost unknown outside the Drones Club. This may be true, I suppose. What is certain is that British readers liked to believe that only they could understand their national humorist. Consider the wartime movie, Pimpernel Smith, in which the stupid and wicked German ...”

“... not the keen sword that cuts into the bleeding tissues, but the hand that wields it – the unseen unknown something, or person, that manifests itself in the horrible workings of nature. So, at the climax of Hudson’s celebrated romance, God is offered to us as a kind of psychopathic gaucho: and those literal gauchos described elsewhere are, we may ...”

“... City Firsts’. A standard procedure in the commissioning of a play, especially one by an unknown author, is for a synopsis to be written and then, once the producer is satisfied that the writer’s ‘idea’ is sound and feasible, for a contract to be offered. It seemed to me a deadening process. I duly presented my ‘idea’, discussed it at ...”

“... which the novelist was then feeling. He had, however, an advocate on the Times who was quite unknown to him: a Scottish infantry officer, lately demobbed, who was well connected but unfortunate enough to have been appointed private secretary to the bizarre Lord Northcliffe. C.K. Scott-Moncrieff had been keeping up with the books that were being read in ...”

“... lit up by vivid contemporary documents. It is good to be reminded that in 1609 Ulster was still ‘unknown ... as the most inland part of Virginia’, and that Spenser compared the Ireland he knew with England in the Dark Ages after Rome. Seen in this way, Irish history has a unity, almost a purpose. Yet, as Johnson emphasises, Ireland’s problems were never ...”

“... he meant the novel, now our principal means of achieving glimpses of intemporal realities, the ‘unknown laws of the kingdom of heaven’. It follows that good novels must be serious, which entails a distinction between seriousness and earnestness, and a claim that the serious is also humorous. The genre of his own novels he defines as ‘humorous ...”

“... one of America’s lesser-known ethnic identities (the town’s only landmark is the Statue of the Unknown Norwegian). This book may be a ‘No 1 American Best-Seller’, but the Wall Street Journal was surely in error in comparing its author to James Thurber. Thurber is remembered for such apocalyptic tales as ‘The night the bed fell’ and ‘The day the ...”