“... position. As for the suggestion that altarpieces were an aid to prayer and good conduct, images may well have been relevant to prayer, but not to good conduct, for which stories provided countless relevant examples. None of these considerations, in fact, tells us much or indeed anything at all about the motives of the patrons. Neither does Ekserdjian’s ...”

“... too quickly. ‘Is it conceivable,’ he once wondered, ‘that (by a strange Nemesis) a parodist may become his own original? Can type and anti-type, parody and anti-parody be thus combined in one person and one poem?’ Inside Clough’s most scathing ironies there’s an uncertainty about who is getting the better of whom. It led him to put some of his ...”

“... children under five. This is famine-level, but the surveys were already out of date. In early May, the same places were visited again and child malnutrition rates were said to have reached 50 per cent.At the beginning of the year the UN estimated that 4.5 million people in Tigray – roughly two-thirds of the population – were in need of emergency ...”

“... is so complete that its roots struggle to absorb water and minerals on their own. The fungus may also be extracting sugars and lipids from other nearby plants, further servicing the flower’s needs. Voyria clearly has a good thing going, but what’s in it for the fungus? Does the flower give its fungal partner something in exchange, or is it a true ...”

“... that make for a good novel – the way that difference can feel threatening to anyone who may be dissatisfied with the path they took, or that some people may be irreversibly terrible. You can’t have it all. It’s unhealthy to think about utopia for more than thirty minutes per ...”

“... of the sort Marc Rich once took, transporting the oil of one state to the pipelines of another, may not be necessary. The oil that flows through the Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline is now supplied by a company called Med-Red Land Bridge. Med-Red is a consortium between two Israeli hydrocarbon infrastructure firms and Petromal, a strange little oil services firm ...”

“... hardly any attempt to make our family history interesting.’ She experienced a kind of shame on 9 May each year when other grandparents came into her school with their war medals and bouquets of flowers. Almost no one in Stepanova’s family was a Communist Party member, but there were also no outspoken dissidents. Instead of great artists or writers, her ...”

“... had won the right to be argued against. In 2012, when it lost its last seat on the council, it may have seemed plausible that its opponents had won the argument. In fact, the BNP had simply handed on the baton.In 2004, the BNP gained more than 800,000 votes in the European elections, some 700,000 more than it had previously, but Ukip won two and a half ...”

“... Here.’ Demands that immigrants ‘go home’ resurface to this day. Four years ago, when Theresa May was home secretary, the Home Office launched a campaign to scare people living in Britain illegally into leaving the country. Large white vans were driven around the country carrying posters bearing the injunction ‘GO HOME OR FACE ARREST.’Olusoga believes ...”

“... as many constraints and fewer comforts. The hoped for careers rarely developed. The bohemian man may have idealised women as muses and models but he was unhampered by bourgeois obligations to be faithful or to earn money, though rarely was he so unconventional as to undertake any housework or childcare. The bohemian woman with children was as much shackled ...”

“... to adopt him as their leader, in the hope, as they put it, that ‘under your guidance we may be able to defend the truth against those who are superstitiously religious.’ The manuscript of the Ethica was more or less complete by 1665, but Spinoza was wary of controversy and refused to publish it.Meanwhile, he was at work on another project: a book ...”

“... specialists. These are generally interpreted as moves towards a more mercantile economy; but there may well have been a shortage of native talent as a result of alarmed opposition exercised by those in authority, who resented new paths to advancement that bypassed old landed values altogether. When the poet Theognis complained that money was now the root of ...”

“... seems haunted by the ethical responsibilities incurred when writing about real people. ‘How far may writers go in exposing those close to them to public scrutiny, sacrificing them for the writer’s own pleasure?’ he asks in My Life as a Russian Novel.This is the sort of unresolvable question Carrère favours. But he is adamant that, at the very ...”

“... another sort of challenge. What does it mean that Emira has no social media accounts? She may be abstaining to save her sanity, but she is also missing out on the opportunity to comment on her life and image, even as it goes viral. That’s where Alix’s cover letter-writing workshops are important: here is a woman who has mastered the problem of how ...”

“... civilisation was seen as the creation of Ancient Greece and Rome. ‘Plato to Nato’ courses may have introduced the mediating influence of Christianity, but essentially they emphasised the classical origins of the civilisation which educated elites in Europe and the US claimed to defend. There were few major politicians in the first half of the 20th ...”