“... believed – as most did – that all species had been created by the Almighty. The Jesuit Père David, who explored China in the 1860s, was propelled by his quest for God’s wonders, and careless of personal hardship. Exploration was by no means confined to rainforests. Conniff is particularly good on the early history of species ‘bagging’ in North ...”

“... the objectives of the treaties all member states have signed and the latter provides that the EU may act only if an individual member state cannot otherwise achieve what it wants in areas outside the EU’s exclusive competence. The UK has a record of ‘gold plating’ EU legislation, by far exceeding its requirements, in areas as diverse as animal ...”

“... orders. A subway worker told the New York Times that he felt more sacrificial than essential.On 25 May, at the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue, Floyd asphyxiated while being pressed into the road under the weight of law enforcement. His dying was watched by passers-by and recorded on mobile phones. Those of us who weren’t present are secondary ...”

“... location, probably in one of the many compounds owned by the Egyptian armed forces. At the end of May, Joe Biden announced a framework for an agreement on what he described as an ‘Israeli ceasefire proposal’, which was immediately rejected by Israel. According to the plan, a ceasefire would be declared and Israeli forces would begin to withdraw from ...”

“... from February to November 1533; de Selve, whose mission, if any, is obscure, from about March to May.Behind the two personages and the table between them is a heavy green curtain, and they and the table are standing on a floor elegantly coloured and patterned in squares and circles enclosed in a continuous decorative band; it looks like a mosaic but has none ...”

“... a hearty, back-slapping, unquenchably loquacious Army type, though there is just a hint that he may be homosexual. As a boy, the narrator hero-worships him, and when they meet again years later Medlicott insists on treating him as an old friend, dining him at expensive restaurants or taking him on exhausting pub crawls. The narrator cannot make up his mind ...”

“... identified as the major obstacle in the way of Zionist fulfilment in the late 19th century, and David Ben-Gurion said in December 1947 that ‘there can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60 per cent.’ Israel, he warned on the same occasion, would have to deal with this ‘severe’ problem with ‘a new ...”

“... and cathedral cloisters, but in 1685, when Philadelphia died, it was still common. Her husband may have wished to record his terrible loss in the dignity of an ancient language, but there was little point in listing the merits of Lady Mary if few other ladies, very few of her servants and fewer still among the poor could read about them. Two centuries ...”

“... he chose to disparage, not least the work of former friends and rival contemporaries. When David Sylvester once asked what precisely was so deplorable about it (a ‘kind of caution’ perhaps?), Bacon’s response was studiedly offhand. ‘Well,’ he drawled, clearing his throat. ‘Well . . . Illustration surely means just illustrating the image ...”

“... The song​  we hear at the beginning of David Leitch’s film Bullet Train is the Bee Gees’ ‘Stayin’ Alive’. It’s a good song and all too relevant, but by the time the movie’s plot gets rolling it sounds more like a fragile wish than any sort of programme. ‘Fate is a name for my bad luck,’ a leading character says ...”

“... can read them later. There is also a flashback to a time when Zeena and her partner (Ian Keith; David Strathairn) were in vaudeville. Their act involved working a complicated code, where one of them would apparently be repeating questions from the audience but was actually signalling facts about the questioners. In the city, a different kind of trick is ...”

“... calling it ‘an academic romance’, and an epigraph from Hawthorne adds that authors of romances may ‘claim a certain latitude, both as to ... fashion and material’, which would not be permitted to anyone professing to write a novel. And, with a touch of the professor, Lodge also directs our attention to Patricia Parker’s admirable book Inescapable ...”

“... The vast David Hockney show at the Royal Academy (until 9 April) is deliberately overwhelming. What it most looks like is an overblown, hyped-up, hyperreal parody of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, that super-English annual gathering of the amateur art establishment, to which the buying public with large pocketbooks flock from the Home Counties and beyond ...”

“... made a Royal Academician in 2005 but he has remained a quiet man of British art in comparison with David Hockney or R.B. Kitaj, his contemporaries at the Royal College of Art in the early 1960s. ‘Swan i’ (1964) The exhibition shows how decisively he transcends the well-worn term ‘postwar British artist’: Bowling is diasporic, resisting easy ...”

“... point in these diaries that the continuously intimate conversations Khrushchev had with Micunovic may have been part of a design to convince the West that relations between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia were much better than they really were. Refuting this, Khrushchev himself insists that they are simply part of his design to put things between the two ...”