“... in 1853 – the death certificate read: ‘Suicide with Oil of Bitter Almonds. State of Mind Unknown’. Ashton’s book – at once detailed and digressive – has something in common with a certain kind of Victorian novel; location is not consistently the focus of attention, but rather the backdrop for other things that catch the eye. Parisian pianos ...”

“... The sound quality was usually good. On them people had long, deep conversations of a sort almost unknown today, now that phones are used while driving, while shopping, while walking in front of cars against the light and into fountains. The general assumption was that when you were on the phone that’s all you were. Letters morphed into emails, and for a ...”

“... life: the identity of senior officers – household names during the wars with Israel – is unknown to most Egyptians. According to reports circulating in the Egyptian press, al-Adly was warned by Mubarak himself at 5 p.m. on 28 January that the army was about to arrive in central Cairo. The same reports suggest that a frustrated al-Adly decided to ...”

“... along with the cast of characters acting in it, also calls for the participation of a mysterious unknown power, an almost symbolic person, appearing to help without being called, and the role of this beneficent and hidden mainspring is played in my life by my brother Evgraf?’ The point, it seems, is not that we all have such symbolic persons in our ...”

“... governed by Einstein-like equations. No need to appeal to the wild, woolly and as yet unknown laws of quantum gravity. Penrose devotes his closing chapter to ‘observational implications’. Like nearly all cosmologists, he trains his eye on the cosmic microwave background radiation as captured by the WMAP satellite. He argues that if his model ...”

“... was a bastard. Cioran was horrible. Cioran was a disgusting fascist’ – addressing the unknown man as if he represented the late Romanian writer.Octavio and Marie-José (whom he always called Marie-Jo) were together until the end; perhaps they tried to remain together after he died, too. Marie-José used to say that she spoke to him every night in ...”

“... correct, but not the second. Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, whose lead candidate was a young unknown, Jordan Bardella, came in ahead with 23.3 per cent of the vote; Macron’s party, La République en Marche, whose list was led by the former minister of European affairs Nathalie Loiseau, took 22.4 per cent. Loiseau spent much of the campaign demonising ...”

“... It wasn’t. It was quoted on the Victoria Derbyshire show, as a written soundbite – given in unknown circumstances – and put to the trans actor Rebecca Root. Root gave a dignified response.) My first reaction here is to feel uneasy about the unitary view of political and cultural virtue that underlies these reactions to Greer. Just because she ...”

“... the damned compulsively re-enacted their sins before being torn limb from limb. Such a sight, unknown in England, could have been suggested by the spectacular ruins of a Roman amphitheatre Thurkill had seen on his travels. Legassie’s engaging book concentrates on three kinds of travel, and on the literary records inspired by each: exotic voyages to the ...”

“... abdication crisis and Guy Fawkes night. Her tone is that of an anthropologist who has spotted an unknown tribe from a great distance. When stumped she reaches for a comparison with Downton Abbey. Like Penny Junor, she has written other royal biographies (of the queen and Princess Diana). Junor, however, is a career journalist, daughter of John Junor, the ...”

“... of influence. The final sections of Lescaze’s book are dedicated to this almost completely unknown tradition. ‘The Primitive World’ by Adolphe François Pannemaker (1857) A precursor​ to Soviet palaeoart is to be found in the State Historical Museum in Moscow. Victor Vasnetsov’s huge mural of early human life, Stone Age, painted for the ...”

“... around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was. Cusk’s first novel appeared when she was 26, and a review of it on American Amazon reads: ‘Although this is an OK book, it is nothing like Bridget Jones except that both ...”

“... pulpit, but on a central open doorway that is completely dark, a fathomless void – except for an unknown somebody, electrifyingly half-glimpsed within. The frisson that this detail emits is so utterly counter to everything Van Eyck is about that it helps us to see the latter’s art more sharply.‘Minus’, we realise, is always waiting to fight it out with ...”

“... enthusiastically by Nikola Tesla, who claimed to have intercepted a signal from ‘another world, unknown and remote’. It began with counting: ‘One … two … three …’The search for extra-terrestrial intelligence – Seti, as it became known – was renewed in 1960 with a programme of long-distance observation conducted by the astronomer Frank ...”

“... memory, destroyed by the fabulous riches plundered from the Greek east. This created hitherto unknown disparities within the oligarchy, and impoverished many citizen-soldiers, unable to keep up their Italian farms while serving long tours of duty overseas. When property restrictions on entry into military service were relaxed, the urban proletariat and ...”