“... of meeting your family and colleagues afterwards, you’d do well to strip off and bathe. (You may wonder whether you need to strip, but the charming detail from Giacomo Jaquerio’s painting that adorns the jacket of Jay Olshansky and Bruce Carnes’s book suggests that this is the convention.) Immortality is not synonymous with eternal ...”

“... the prohibition of the threat or use of force in international affairs. The aberration may be temporary, but there are reasons to believe that something fundamental has changed. The US Government wields more power than any regime since the Roman Empire. With 12 aircraft carriers, the only significant heavy airlift capacity and the only major stocks ...”

“... zero tolerance or homeland security, Ferguson’s description of the American way of condemnation may offer some useful pointers to this country’s future. When it comes to the ‘war on terror’, however, Ferguson is reticent. The subject is given less than a page, and though he allows that prosecuting terrorists is important, he makes the puzzling claim ...”

“... a lot of difference to you, too. But, as I say, you can’t argue with a novel.) Well, then, Grue may or may not be dead, and his death may or may not have been a homicide. Sharpe proposes to find out. (It doesn’t enter her calculations that ...”

“... a title that imposed no obligations whatsoever. So far as Magnificence was concerned, it may have been rather too easy to recognise in the monarch of the play, who declares, ‘Lusty Pleasure is my desire to have,’ the young king who wrote: ‘Pastime with good company/I love, and shall until I die’. It seems to have been written for a London ...”

“... peninsula of Paliki, now attached to Kefalonia, but once, he claims, a separate island. Geologists may manage to prove that Paliki was once detached from Kefalonia, but the description of Ithaca in the Odyssey will still fail to match the geography of the area (Homer’s Ithaca, for example, boasted a ‘well visible mountain’, whereas Paliki is flat). We ...”

“... kill themselves at Guantánamo. The study refers to three confirmed suicides and two deaths that may have been suicides in 2007; it suggests there were at least 120 attempts by inmates to hang themselves in 2003 alone – authorities log these under the heading ‘manipulative self-injurious behaviour’. Fletcher and Stover are worried by the rapid erosion ...”

“... supposed to (Roland Barthes: ‘Is History not simply that time when we were not born?’), and it may have an element of fiction in it. ‘We launched our marriage in guilt,’ Diana says. ‘Everyone had to be listened to, apologised to, thanked for giving us permission to live our lives. On our first day of marriage, starting our honeymoon, all we could ...”

“... of Jarrow and always spoke for the workers. Yet this well-written biography surprises us: she may have been a founding spirit of the party but her interests, associations and beliefs took her a long way from the straightforward defence of the Labour Party as we have come to know it. At one point a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and ...”

“... of women with rounded bellies frolicking in baths connected by strange tubes, and a list of what may be alchemical or herbal recipes. No one knows its author or origins, and no one can read it. The faded brown script is written in an unknown alphabet that has baffled historians, cryptographers and bibliophiles for nearly six centuries. When Umberto Eco ...”

“... journeyman to a deep causal agent, lifting the lid on questions of love and loyalty as he goes. He may be a victim of the 20th century, but he is also one of its splendid creations, a man in league with his times, looking out for a vital connection. Jackie, the child of the ill-fitting Melvilles, thinks she might have caused the explosion that killed her ...”

“... in the summer of 1533, she was six months pregnant, and it is not unreasonable to think that she may have found the lengthy and elaborate ceremonies exhausting, but we’re told that ‘never had she loved life so much.’It is frustrating, too, that Hunting the Falcon doesn’t make more space for a consideration of the historical debate. There has been ...”

“... new levels of celebrity on the right aren’t lost – they are found.’ Wolf, as Klein says, may well still think Bannon is ‘the devil’, in which case she may be some sort of Faust. ‘She is getting everything she once had and lost – attention, respect, money, power. Just through a warped mirror.’‘Thank you ...”

“... the government appears to be entertaining the expansion of its nuclear weapons programme. In May the MoD suggested that the number of full-time army personnel might be increased from its current figure of 72,500 to 76,000 soldiers. But the SDR recommended no increase, though it did recognise ‘a strong case for a small increase in regular numbers when ...”

“... on bail are being given court dates in 2029. Victims and defendants are in limbo: the guilty ones may well think they’ve got away with it. Witnesses’ memories fade; some are no longer willing to engage with the process. It is an intolerable state of affairs. The number of defendants remanded in custody pending trial almost doubled between 2018 and ...”