“... about Dr Runcie’s travels: Hasn’t it all got rather out of hand? A disintegrated church at home is not healed by fixing its gaze on distant shores and the residual politics of post-imperial times ... England stands at a disadvantage as compared with other components of the United Kingdom – with Scotland, Wales, even Ulster, though this is a more ...”

“... to observe the impact of safe injection sites and the Scottish government tried to persuade the Home Office to allow local authorities to run pilots. The stasis that followed was the result of Westminster intransigence and a lack of courage (plus an exercise in grievance politics) on the part of the SNP and its then ...”

“... The End of Decline: Blair and Brown in Power, as well as biographies of the Labour Party eminences Lord Goodman and Hugh Gaitskell. He met Naqvi’s family just after his arrest in London. The pivot of the book is Abraaj’s planned sale of Karachi Electric to a Chinese company, which Brivati contends made Naqvi a danger to US national security ...”

“... she finds him becoming. It brings to his mind Ezekiel 37.3: ‘Mortal, can these bones live? Oh Lord God, you know.’ This is the powerful passage set in a valley of dry bones, where the bones come together, are covered with sinews, flesh and skin, breath is put into them and they live, ‘a vast multitude’. The scene is not one of ...”

“... taken the fateful step of becoming a Calvinist. He obtained the patronage of Louis Chasteignier, lord of La Roche-Pozay near Poitiers, and in 1565 accompanied him on a diplomatic mission to Italy. Despite his Calvinistic contempt for Italian scholars and the Catholic Church – he preferred talking Hebrew with the learned Jews of Mantua and Ferrara to ...”

“... and about to leave school for London when an extreme crisis overwhelms him. He cries out to the Lord Jesus, much as his father might have done, to ‘come now and take me to be for ever with Thee in Thy Paradise’. The Lord Jesus (like Godbole’s Shri Krishna in A Passage to India) neglects to come, and straightway the ...”

“... a true aristocrat will be wearing very filthy and ragged old tweeds; or again that, if you are Lord Grey and Foreign Secretary at a moment of national crisis, your heart nevertheless does not lie there but in birdwatching. In Buchan’s novels there is a nice variant, which we may call the principle of ‘not being really there’ (it recalls ...”

“... purchase to establish efficient local monopolies in water and gas. The prospect of Irish Home Rule drove Chamberlain and his fellow Liberal Unionists out of the Gladstonian Liberal Party in 1886, and the Liberal Unionists found themselves in an increasingly close relationship with the Tories, eventually amalgamating with them. But Chamberlain, a ...”

“... or even the start of one, than its resolution. Occasionally something happens to bring this home to my profession when, after fighting like cocks for our living, we have bowed to the judge, gathered our papers and gone off for tea together. (Mon cher confrère, says the Daumier cartoon which adorns barristers’ walls like a talisman.) A wife, divorced ...”

“... beginning of the story. Perhaps he, too, will now paint flower pieces in vivid colours; and set up home with Jacki. The Artist’s Widow is indefatigably up to date. It has everything: conceptual art and Conservatives with lost seats and abandoned mistresses, paedophilia, snuff movies, public relations women in suits, TV interviewers, suburban developments ...”

“... of Christ’s life Mark accompanied the group and suggests that the Last Supper was held in the home of a close relative. I have used the word ‘group’ because I was constantly reminded of the Rolling Stones. There is an emphasis on the problems the leader of the band has in evading his fans. At the beginning of his book Mr McCowen casts doubt on the ...”

“... in reference to Number 45 of John Wilkes’s Radical paper the North Briton, which attacked Lord Bute’s ministry as ‘the foul dregs of power, the tools of corruption and despotism’. The issue was ordered to be burned, with the usual consequence that everybody heard about it. Benjamin Franklin, travelling from London to Winchester in 1768, remarked ...”

“... is, of course, as a collection, international) is a little confusing. They would be more at home alongside the 19th-century pictures in (or once in) the British national collection at the Tate. The Berlin Nationalgalerie, which opened in 1876, had, like the Tate (but much earlier), a remit to collect and display new native work. Like the Tate, it became ...”

“... Murray, a 21-year-old undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford, who’s written a biography of Lord Alfred Douglas. Tina Brown flew all the way from New York to meet young Douglas (Murray not Alfred) before buying the US rights to the book. It’s been embargoed till 15 June, but presumably it’s all right to reveal that Murray thinks ‘Bosie’ and his ...”

“... is ragged and unbridled, the trim front space, winding its way through dinky dolmens, looks a bit Lord of the Rings.More striking, more sea-drenched, is the neighbouring tumble of washed-up pink Crocs, wellingtons and grey flip-flops installed by a litter picker in front of his home, which is made up of two third-class ...”