“... of foreign capital to Britain, while leaving the EU is likely to accelerate an outflow that may dwarf the UK’s relatively modest net contribution to the EU budget. So going back to 1392 does not seem like a very sensible answer to our predicament. And how strange it is at this late date to see the defunct Act in Restraint of Appeals held up for our ...”

“... opening pages of Conceiving God: The Cognitive Origin and Evolution of Religion, the archaeologist David Lewis-Williams examines the earliest records of symbolic behaviour. It is unlikely we will ever pinpoint just when the human habit of investing objects with significance took hold. But for the moment, until fresh discoveries arrive, the most striking ...”

“... and a peacock called Mirabell, all of it recorded with the help of Merrill’s longtime partner, David Jackson, during twenty years of séances using a Ouija board at their home in Stonington, Connecticut. This volume tips in at 560 pages. Merrill also wrote novels, plays and two memoirs. Born to enormous wealth, he had little to distract him from his ...”

“... band of six men – Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, Michael Webb and David Greene – whose day jobs were with big commercial practices and local authorities. They formed in the early 1960s and over the next decade or so produced thousands of designs for ‘cities of the future’ that were highly original, sometimes on the ...”

“... the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) and West Ham, under the majority ownership of David Gold and David Sullivan, two businessmen who had made their money from pornography, agreed that the club would acquire a 99-year lease on the Olympic stadium. By then, West Ham had gone too far to retreat – not least in ...”

“... it turns out, actually wants to meet his maker. A later implication is that the creature may not have been interested in spreading his genes, only in testing some noxious experimental liquid that his species had developed on a planet safely distant from its own home. Still, the firm is clear about the evidence. The DNA of the dead people in this ...”

“... Rafah crossing. (A commentator in Haaretz warns that Israel, now relishing Morsi’s overthrow, may come to miss him.) He couldn’t abide criticism, and appeared to have no more scruples than Mubarak about torture or attacks on the press. Worst of all, he did nothing to improve an economy in free-fall or to reform the security services, while styling ...”

“... patient is Jung’s, a disturbed woman not at all underplayed by Keira Knightley. The movie – David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, with a screenplay by Christopher Hampton – opens with a view of her struggling against her captors in a horse-drawn coach (the date is 1904) and being delivered to a posh sanatorium in Switzerland. She goes rigid when ...”

“... was quickly recognised as the worst in the history of presidential debates. In a close contest, it may have done him terminal damage.Instead of blaming Kissinger for having been too clever by half in the debate prep, Ford blamed himself for being too slow-witted to do the briefing justice. Schwartz describes what happened next:Meeting with Kissinger a few days ...”

“... The gross underestimation of the ability of the Lebanese to defend themselves is the main theme of David Hirst’s elegantly written and highly informed history. For many years one of the most perceptive correspondents in the Middle East, he says he decided to write this book after the 34-day war in the summer of 2006, when Israel rained explosives on Lebanon ...”

“... how carefully Lawrence refuses to recognise virtue in anyone but himself’), and his sponsor David Pryce-Jones now finds F.R. Leavis much the same, so it may be legitimate to cite the famous excoriation of Bloomsbury that was voiced by Lawrence and amplified by Leavis: ‘they talked endlessly, but endlessly – and ...”

“... Kadare dropped a few passages and added some new ones in a French edition of 1997, however, and David Bellos has changed the English text accordingly, as well as making ‘stylistic amendments here and there where they seemed called for’. (Bellos’s judgment in matters of style is not unerring. In Spring Flowers, Spring Frost, for example, which he ...”

“... in Europe by the Middle Ages. ‘Grimoire’ is French for ‘grammary’, a book of grammar: it may have been adopted because the manuscripts were often in Latin; perhaps it was a term used more generally of abstruse, esoteric texts. Certainly, grimoires had been around for many hundreds of years before they were known as such. There are grimoires among the ...”

“... concert could prevent the spread of these to other major industrial nations. Hindsight may suggest that it was folly for Britain and France to have been tempted down the road, but that wisdom was just as far from those in the seats of power then as it seems to be from most of our rulers today. In 1950 when it was decided to go ahead with the ...”

“... as superficial. Nothing, as Wilde added, is more superficial than thought. For women, who may be assaulted, imprisoned or killed because of what they do or do not wear, clothes may be a matter of life or death. Anne Higonnet’s new book is somewhat belied by its subtitle, which plays to the idea of fashion as ...”