“... refusal to believe that atheism really exists. Sir Thomas Browne writes that religious sceptics do not ‘incline me to any point of infidelity or desperate positions of atheism, for I have been, these many years, of opinion there was never any.’ This seems to be Johnson’s attitude. Of the famous atheists he mentions, he exhibits a wary respect only for ...”

“... had been left to him to dispose of as he thought fit, and that the executive had nothing to do with it’, was not just Shavian hyperbole. His incredulity at the Fabians’ supine acceptance of some token Hutchinson Lectures, duly propagating socialism, at the price of Webb being allowed ‘to commit an atrocious malversation of the rest of the ...”

“... such a power has been supposed to exist in the actinic rays which the luminary sends forth[.] I do not know ‘Euere d’or fin’. And in a very few places we can witness Faraday losing his temper with this seemingly endless barrage of requests, as in the unpunctuated pique of his reply to William Tierney ...”

“... presented an end-of-year show in which his ritualistic efforts to flirt with the likes of Jerry Hall were a running gag. His memoirs, which now run to five volumes, were another aspect of his king-of-all-media status at the height of his fame, though they stopped appearing for a while in the 1990s. An accepted fixture of the small-screen world, James ...”

“... rely on mystery. Who killed the old lady? We don’t know, so we read on to find out. Perhaps we do know, so we read on to see if the killer will be caught. It may be that we know the culprit’s identity, and know they’ll be caught, but we read on to find out how, and why they did it. Or perhaps we know all these things, but, having been introduced to a ...”

“... Steer Davies Gleave, he believes the project is essential for Britain’s future welfare. ‘Do you know what the population of Britain will be in 2085?’ he asks, and then answers his own question: ‘85 million. Where will all those people go? London can only accommodate a couple of million or so. The rest will have to be elsewhere. And if we are to ...”

“... is currently a very real risk that Brexit will distract from austerity – no longer the disaster du jour – which will nonetheless grind on, its victims unheard amid the squabbling and its effects quietly naturalised as part of Theresa May’s new political settlement. Philip Hammond’s first Autumn Statement, delivered to Parliament on 23 ...”

“... doesn’t mention whether or not he had seen Emmer’s famous 1950 feature Domenica d’Agosto.) His activity began to annoy: using the simple materials to hand, particularly available light only, the young man was producing images which didn’t appear to his bosses to be giving a sufficiently glamorous or polished account of the revolutionary ...”

“... to rise during the period of suspense that ends just before the grand dinner at Stationers’ Hall; the winner gets an extra bonus of more sales; and the sponsors presumably do at least as well out of the enterprise as they would by spending the same amount of cash on cricket or golf. Although Booker has a financial ...”

“... and valuers, who submitted the stamp to the Royal Philatelic Society. On 30 January 1931, Thomas Hall, president of the Society, signed Certificate 14,764 of the Expert Committee, on which was written: ‘This stamp is a variety unchronicled and hitherto unknown to the Expert Committee. Having regard to the lapse of time since this stamp was issued, the ...”

“... did not get where they are by ceding their land for the common good. This holds true today, as too do the last rites of deference: London is ninety miles and many decades distant. The hierarchies of the military and the landed nobility are matched by those of the Church, whose temporal power is unusually broad because it is a major landlord. Anglicanism is not ...”

“... proper soundings, which is pretty much what happened on the morning of 2 July 1816, when Captain de Chaumareys piloted the French frigate Medusa into shallow water near the coast of Senegal – though in his case it was sheer incompetence rather than a deliberate decision. As crew members noted, the waters into which the Medusa was sailing were ominously ...”

“... trouncing or violently refuting, the book is safe, principally because one experiences no wish to do either of these things. The arguments are presented in mannerly fashion; though the writer is currently agnostic, he makes no attempt to stampede or manhandle the readers into agnosticism. The style is light, to the point of sprightliness sometimes, but ...”

“... to embed herself within networks of mutually supportive artists and thinkers. Her paintings of David Garrick and Johann Joachim Winckelmann, made in Rome early in her career, helped to establish her fame in Britain, where she moved in 1766. Shortly after she arrived, her portrait was painted by Joshua Reynolds, soon to be president of the Royal ...”

“... In David Grossman’s 1998 novel, Be My Knife, an antiquarian book-dealer starts a passionate correspondence with a woman whom he has barely caught sight of across a room. The unlikely circumstances of their relationship, its unusual fusion of intimacy and distance, allow them to say, or rather write, things which neither of them has ever admitted before ...”