“... Sometimes they are associated with key events in the history of the religion concerned. They may, like Bethlehem and Mecca, have been the founder’s birthplace, or, like Jerusalem and Lourdes, the scene of apparitions, martyrdoms or miracles. Mount Ararat in Turkey is sacred to the Armenians because it is where Noah’s Ark came to rest. Mount Kailas in ...”

“... get out that one corner or another is the place to go to get hold of your drug of choice: this may be your only option if, say, you’re a first-time buyer in a big city or haven’t yet managed to find a network you trust. The quality of the drugs varies dramatically and the chances of being ripped off, arrested or physically attacked are relatively ...”

“... ongoing affair with the English heritage. Mr Johnson’s volume on British Cathedrals may be in a well-established tradition, but it has unusual features. His criterion of selection is simply that a building must have been, or become, the seat of a bishop. Thus St Albans and Peterborough, Norman abbeys ‘episcopalised’ respectively in 1877 and ...”

“... diaries), to which Park Honan draws attention, are of particular interest; and others like them may yet be found. The discovery of the play Sir Charles Grandison, or The Happy Man, the work of Jane Austen and her niece Anna, suggests that there may even yet be additions to the small body of literary manuscripts. There, at ...”

“... fin de siècle is on its way out. If there are readers then, and if they are reading Gibbon, they may not be Euro-Americans and may be integrating the Decline and Fall into histories of their own – if, again, they are so fortunate as to possess histories. It was in 1896 also that Syaji Rao Gaekwar, Maharaja of Baroda, an ...”

“... a home so costly as to exceed easily imagined explanations? The astronomical price of the Van Gogh may have been an eccentricity, rather than a milestone in the inevitable ascent to the $100 million canvas, and the same may be said of the $17.5 for which the Johns was knocked down. Indeed, the giddiness which characterised ...”

“... one of many controversial, not to say fateful, judgments made by the prime minister last year. In May, with infections and hospitalisations falling, political pressure began mounting for a relaxation of lockdown restrictions, not least in order to distract attention from the row that broke out at the end of that month over Dominic Cummings’s drive to ...”

“... to a hostile cosmos results in your inevitable destruction, so sending messages into space may be something no sensible civilisation would do. If so, we may come to regret the 2008 advert for Doritos transmitted by one of the most powerful radar systems on the planet towards a star in the constellation of Ursa ...”

“... effort to fuse them into one.‘Writing a biography of Michel Foucault,’ he confesses, ‘may seem paradoxical. Did he not, on numerous occasions, challenge the notion of the author, thereby dismissing the very possibility of a biographical study?’ These are Eribon’s first two sentences: but nowhere in the book does he explore, let alone ...”

“... Duchesse de Guermantes and finds her going to a party. He blurts out that he is mortally ill and may not be seeing her again. She ignores this news and gives him a smiling farewell as she gets into her carriage. E.M. Forster thought the scene one of the most odious in the novel, or rather in the Novel, and he seems to assume, rather naively, that Proust is ...”

“... remains – why the history of thought? ... The enterprise seems not only unfashionable; it may even be called élitist.’ The charge of ‘élitism’ (surely in itself a little old-fashioned?) arises because ‘the writers of these texts may have belonged to the ruling “élite”.’ It is evidently bad form to ...”

“... the implementation of GCSE, and about the disruption caused by industrial action. For Londoners, 8 May marked the opportunity to participate in the direct election of a local education authority: the result, an overwhelming endorsement of existing ILEA policies, should provide Kenneth Baker with plenty to think about. And for thousands of students there is, as ...”

“... some particularly penetrating points. A major question arises for every type of content a belief may have. What is the relation between theories of those contents which individuate them by reference to truth conditions, and theories which claim to individuate them without any such reference? Are such theories in competition, or not? And if not, how should ...”

“... Recent comparisons of the Hellenistic Age with our own fragmented culture may have persuaded at least some curious readers to dip into Theocritus, Polybius or Apollonius Rhodius. Yet how many have so much as heard of Callimachus? The books discussed here are by serious scholars; they require, between them, an investment of some £450, and comprise a total of more than two thousand pages – at a generous estimate, one page for every intact surviving line of the author they discuss ...”

“... for a late and largely undetected Labour surge in the run-up to the 2017 general election, Theresa May might now be steering us through the Covid-19 crisis: trusted, sensible and reliable, however costively unimaginative and incapable of the nimble feats of very un-Conservative gymnastics so far performed by Boris Johnson’s chancellor, Rishi Sunak. And ...”