“... as Earth Hour, or raising funds for forest restoration. Many are vegetarians, and they worship David Attenborough. On the other hand, they are addicted to overseas holidays, which leave a large carbon footprint; to online shopping (usually packed in several layers of bubblewrap) and takeaway food (packed in single-use plastic boxes); and to fast ...”

“... killing of 13 demonstrators in October 2000, to Benjamin Netanyahu’s election day warning last May: ‘Arab voters are coming out in droves to the polls. Left-wing organisations are busing them out.’ The spectre of ‘Arab voters’ was hardly new: the Israeli right has never looked fondly on Arabs exercising their voting rights, unless they can be ...”

“... the horizon. Kavenna might have mentioned this as the probable origin of many delusory Thules; it may even underpin the Flat Earthers’ conviction that a great ice barrier forms the rim of the disc on which we all live. In any case, her own internal compass is evidently appeased by snow, ice and wintry desolation. But in her prose I miss the intense ...”

“... a frequently bloody vengeance that will end the cycle but at a heavy cost. As the Freud-inspired David Quint has argued, this is the dilemma that confronts the central character of the Aeneid. The first part of Virgil’s epic portrays a retrogressive Aeneas, whose boat turns about, who seeks to found a simulacrum of Troy and who wishes for the death that ...”

“... about the brief moment of joy he felt when he saw the planes fly into the twin towers – ‘David beating Goliath’ – at which point ‘you’ (Liev Schreiber) turns firm and Bruce Willis-like and says: ‘and you wonder why your family is being threatened.’ Changez is seen giving a lecture at Lahore University and bellowing ‘We will wipe the ...”

“... the pro-Union vote was divided among Labour, the Tories, the Liberal Democrats and, strange as it may seem, the SNP, which downplayed any talk of independence and masqueraded instead as Authentic Old Labour. Under normal circumstances, the SNP would have interpreted its 56-seat triumph as a mandate to negotiate independence. But at the current juncture, in ...”

“... that pop into your head. Does that sound pretentious?’ Giving four answers and a qualification may have been characteristic: ‘We haven’t got a message really; the lyrics are open to interpretation. They’re multi-dimensional. You can read into them whatever you like. Obviously they’re important to the band.’ These sentences aren’t the usual ...”

“... found no human presence, and there is no archaeological record of pre-European colonisation. This may be one of the very few cases in the New World in which the word ‘discovery’ is not a misnomer. In Evolution’s Workshop, his chronological account of the biological exploration of the islands, Edward Larson tells the colourful story of the visitors who ...”

“... opinions married to a successful businessman. (Florence’s mother has been a friend of Elizabeth David and is a friend of Iris Murdoch.) Both stories are set at a very precise date, with debates about socialism, Britain’s decline as a world power, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Both works exude a sense, alive in McEwan’s work since The Child ...”

“... to be spreading, no doubt being seen in high places as a sound qualification for anyone who may now be angling to land a job sorting things out in Iraq itself. The man who has been put in charge of a body called the Iraq Industry Working Group was quoted last week as saying that within quite a short time – as little as three years, he thought – Iraq ...”

“... My visit​ to Jamaica in May was shadowed by the likelihood of two important endings. One was familial. Sister Maureen Clare – my late husband Stuart Hall’s cousin and his last living relative on the island – was gravely ill. For decades, Clare had given us a home in Kingston. The other related to my work as a historian ...”

“... in order.’ Art remains ‘the one orderly product which our muddling race has produced’. You may think he should have been on the side of James, but he allowed his distaste for the pattern – and the style – to persuade him momentarily to accept a substitute for the force and beauty of art, something for which he had, on his own account, expressly ...”

“... On 18 May 1593 a warrant was issued to ‘apprehend’ Christopher Marlowe, and on 20 May he was brought before the Privy Council for questioning. He was not detained, but was ordered to report to the Council daily until ‘licensed to the contrary’. This state of precarious liberty lasted only until 30 May, when he was fatally stabbed by a man named Ingram Frizer, though whether his sudden death was a matter of coincidence or conspiracy remains unresolved ...”

“... act: citizens have a right to call on an elected office-holder to resign, just as he or she may choose to stay in office until defeated at the polls. The petition said nothing about the army, let alone calling on it to act in the matter. The same was true of the mobilisation for the 30 June demonstrations. Several well-known groups that had played key ...”

“... complex situation, contradicting mythological simplifications, yet showing where the roots of such may be found. Likewise, she confirms, so far as this area goes, the traditional view that lower-class Scots showed an unusual thirst for learning – as when the people of remote Glen Tilt petitioned the 3rd Duke in 1769 for a school convenient for their ...”