“... offer him only an anchor at a familiar harbour and from which he wished to sail on to new and unknown horizons. In other words, we should never underestimate the desperation of the fat . . . Although Oliver Hardy insisted, to the end of his life, that he adored and worshipped his mother, they rarely met again, and the maverick son of the old politician of ...”

“... and the private man. Yet, despite the excesses to which some barristers are prone, it is almost unknown for them to become notorious for their bacchanalian lifestyles. So why is it that George Carman’s private exploits now threaten to overshadow his achievements in the courtroom? Because he had a son who was waiting until he died to get his own ...”

“... attempts to strike it becomes nothing more than a piece of rope.’ The fact that rattlesnakes are unknown in Africa is just another embarrassing oversight (like the fact that the enslaved women manage to keep their jewelry, along with their honour) in a film that is hardly less fantastical than Roots, but merely exploits a greater technical proficiency to ...”

“... Hopkins’s St Eadburga’s, Worcester. The use of negatives is sparing but effective. ‘Widely unknown’ (describing a minor architect) is one of the best.By the end of the project Pevsner felt that he was too tired and the writing just ‘scribble, scribble, scribble. If only one could be proud of the result.’ In fact, the prose never went slack or ...”

“... a conversation with the optical scientist Charles Falco opened his eyes to the existence, hitherto unknown to him, of concave mirror projections. With Falco, he started to analyse how paintings could be assembled from them, and then to find ways of distinguishing different eras in projection technique. Repeatedly, Hockney goes out of his way to stress that ...”

“... are descended from Byzantine or late antique building types that were forgotten, ignored or unknown elsewhere in Europe; there are similar myths about the origins of the Venetians themselves. Juergen Schulz, unhappy with the evidence adduced by proponents of these theories and struck by the absence of research on many aspects of the subject, decided to ...”

“... frequently performed and widely written about in recent years, Die Bürgschaft remains almost unknown. Whatever its flaws, it is unquestionably the most highly developed of Weill’s stage works, and perhaps the one by which all the others should be judged. For even the most experienced critic it represents a formidable challenge. But Mr Sanders promptly ...”

“... Mansfield’s life, to what is hesitantly known and to what (sometimes more resoundingly) remains unknown. But it does not greatly alter our view of her since she emerged from the mists of Murry’s high-mindedness. She ‘craved for experience and a name’ wrote Hugh Kingsmill in 1938. She had been born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp, the third daughter of a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Crippen’s young and fertile wife was persuaded that she required this form of intervention is unknown,’ Rubenhold writes. Crippen later claimed that Cora suffered from a prolapsed uterus and had painful periods, but Cora’s sister protested that she’d never said anything about this.‘You know how I love babies,’ Cora wrote to her sister in ...”

“... that the embassy had been taken over by gunmen, though their identities and demands were still unknown. I guessed that they must have some connection with the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran, which was what the newly created government of the Islamic Republic of Iran also believed. These were the first uncertain moments of the six-day siege. Since ...”

“... Brahic calls a ‘revolutionary concept’ in science is either poorly understood or completely unknown, something his book seeks to correct.After the discovery of prions, many biochemists fundamentally rethought their ideas about protein behaviour. Their focus shifted from establishing what particular disorder a prion might cause to understanding what the ...”