“... times lower than the true number. The World Health Organisation is now involved and the reality may become apparent in the next few weeks. The initial lack of testing and lack of isolation of cases – denialism by the regime – is likely to lead to healthcare services being overwhelmed and tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths.Most democratic ...”

“... century of national politics are in crisis; an astonishing YouGov poll conducted at the end of May put both Labour and the Conservatives on 19 per cent, behind the Liberal Democrats and Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. An Opinium poll subsequently put the Brexit Party out in front on 26 per cent. Farage’s outfit has adopted the model of a platform ...”

“... codex. As early as 125, what later became Biblical text already took the form of a book. The book may give way to the screen some time soon but it has been with us now for two thousand years – and de Hamel’s main argument is that it is essentially the product of our Biblical culture. So, the jagged triangle in the Rylands is the closest we can get to our ...”

“... is going to get us into all kinds of trouble, psychic and material. But partial, affective denial may be a loyalty to whatever the facts destroyed or replaced. Why should we let go mentally, in our stories, so to speak, of what we have already lost in every other sense? To refuse, at least initially, to accept the death of a person we love ...”

“... biography, with its Cambridge imprint, makes this revival official. Even ‘England Arise’ may receive its dusting-off. The question still remains: what England, and what active relationship might this revival have to Edward Carpenter himself? Historians, for what it is worth, have never cared much for Carpenter. Peculiar alliances are struck over this ...”

“... come to view all consensual sex, including consensual paedophilia, positively and without guilt may be necessary for the welfare of everyone.’ ‘Consensual sex’, mutually agreed and mutually agreeable: is there anything unreasonable in wanting it for oneself but not for one’s children – or Mr O’Carroll? Were Mr O’Carroll a more accomplished ...”

“... damage on his torn and battered colleagues. Roy Hattersley’s quaintly-named Solidarity Campaign may reverse some of the wilder decisions taken at the Wembley conference in January, but even if it does the Party will still be committed to an electoral college of some sort, and the leadership will still be even more obviously in thrall to an incompetent and ...”

“... has hardened. Starmer vies with Macron for the accolade of least popular European leader. It may be cold comfort in Number Ten, but Starmer is only repeating the pattern established by Britain’s post-Brexit leaders. Each takes office lauded by the press as offering a new vision for British politics – May’s sketch ...”

“... make no allowance. It is enormously important to grasp why the thought is mistaken. Someone may be aware that he knows very little about the workings of, say, the magistrates’ courts or the welfare services, particularly as they affect black people. But he knows, or he thinks he knows, what the level of racial prejudice is amongst the people with whom ...”

“... a not-too-oblique attack on Irish neutrality in the course of a visit to Northern Ireland on 4 May, he was – presumably – unaware of the fact that he was reopening a book which both Churchill and de Valera had decided peaceably to close almost exactly thirty years ago. That at any rate would be the charitable explanation. Within hours of his ...”

“... whether by intuition or ratiocination, to writers of detective stories. That a cultural assumption may lead to false interpretation of clues is a donnée of all those crime stories in which a nursery rhyme seems to provide a key to a sequence of murders – Ten Little Indians, for instance. And of course the work of the detective often consists in ...”

“... about 10 per cent longer than Hopman’s. As to the quality of the new translation two samples may illustrate how it stands to the old: Old: With each attempt to draw a sharp line of demarcation between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, this borderline has receded further and further backwards. New: Each attempt made to date to clearly separate the ...”

“... causal truths, it is supposed to follow that ‘If p then r’ is also a causal truth. This may not seem counterintuitive if one mentions only three propositions, but the extension of the transitivity over even a century, let alone the billions of years that have elapsed since the universe came into existence, if it had a beginning, has strange ...”

“... book, part self-revelation, part art object. Now, some thirty years on, she has assembled what may be its culmination. Honey from a Weed is less a cookery book than a summing-up of the genre of the late modern British cookery book. It is a book like very few others, although it has some of the style of the 17th-century commonplace book, replete with ...”

“... and at the close of the book offers a description of Chateaubriand’s Vie de Rancé that may well be meant as self-referential: ‘It was his final surrender to free – even wild – association, a perverse rummaging in his own memory that stirred up shadows among the ruins of time ... The prose juxtaposes facts, quotations, and recollections like ...”