“... a detective: independent, impatient with trivialities, logical, and orderly to a fault. In ‘The Unknown Weapon’, the most complex of the stories, she has to solve an especially knotty murder. Graham Petleigh, the destitute son of a miserly squire is found dead outside his father’s country house. What and where is the murder weapon? Why was a large black ...”

“... Kaufman, Harpo Marx, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker and the others were in their twenties and unknown. But they were wits, albeit at each other’s expense much of the time, and Ross watched with interest from the sidelines, every so often giving out ‘teamsterlike snorts’ of appreciation or ‘explosive, left-field interjections’. Several of the ...”

“... the other one: it appears to ‘possess a directional memory, although the basis of this memory is unknown’.‘Solving mazes and complex routing problems are non-trivial exercises,’ Sheldrake writes. ‘This is why mazes have long been used to assess the problem-solving abilities of many organisms, from octopuses to bees to humans.’ Fungi ace these ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was particularly struck by the dominance of works made by artists who were hitherto quite unknown to me. Pavel Braila, for instance, exhibited a film, shot on digital video and then transferred to 16mm, Shoes for Europe, which documents the complicated passage of a train from Moldova, Braila’s country of origin, to Romania and the West, via the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... know where his friend had been taken, whether to the mines or the fields – Duck’s fate was unknown, as is the case for so many people whose stories can never be told.It’s a poignant tale, a seemingly fitting peroration to Grann’s argument about the inequities and silences of history. Before this, we’re told, Duck, Morris and their two ...”

“... on less savoury work in the private sector.At the start of the novel, she’s been sent by an unknown party to spy on the Moulinards, who are suspected of torching several excavators, worth hundreds of thousands of euros, as a protest against a government scheme to construct several ‘megabasins’: enormous reservoirs meant to mitigate the effects of ...”

“... of them were soon translated into French, but in the Anglophone literary world she has remained unknown and untranslated until now. The Unforgivable contains the two essay collections published in her lifetime: Fairy Tale and Mystery (1962) and The Flute and the Carpet (1971). In addition, there are brief essays on Williams, Donne, Chekhov and Borges, some ...”

“... on ideas of mutuality, substitution and a common littoral identity’, as people buried their unknown comrades in coastal society to establish a ‘translocal community of grief’. In all these ways, Kosmin argues, the Hellenistic coastline became a ‘hyperobject’, like evolution or global warming today: ‘massively distributed entities relative to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... breaks the scene up. This scene is mirrored in Big Business (1988), when Bette Midler meets her unknown identical twin, wearing an identical suit, in a powder room in which a series of mirrors is separated by a series of open spaces, and the two of them play the mirror scene until they realise they are twins. Mistaking someone else for your own reflection ...”

“... terms of authors I admire, like Conrad. I thought of Heart of Darkness, a tale, a journey into an unknown destination, to an unknown ending. He also said in an interview that ‘the whole thing could be a paradigm for what is happening’ in Northern Ireland. Originally, I’d have said that wasn’t true, but maybe ...”