“... by vaccines. If your antibodies block Spike, you block the virus – and if Spike has mutated, it may have become better at dodging those antibodies. Delta has been the most vicious variant so far, with a Spike that allows it to enter cells more efficiently and brush off some antibodies. The strange Spikes of Epsilon, Zeta, Eta etc all passed by without great ...”

“... net zero carbon emissions by 2050 was added to the Climate Change Act. This move, made by Theresa May shortly before she resigned as prime minister, was strongly supported by the Conservative Environment Network, whose members now include half the MPs on the Tory back benches. But since COP26, loud complaints have been coming from a small group of Tory MPs ...”

“... Degas and Manet were making transcriptions of Velázquez’s Infanta Margarita at the time. Or it may be symptomatic of the French interest in the English pastoral. Delacroix visited England in 1825, meeting both Lawrence and Richard Parkes Bonington; the trip inspired his outdoor portrait of Louis-Auguste Schwiter, which Degas later bought for his private ...”

“... In his long-awaited book Kuwait: Vanguard of the Gulf,* Peter Mansfield may unwittingly have written an obituary for the Amirate, so suddenly and unexpectedly overrun by Iraq on 2 August. Like most obituaries, it concentrates on the positive aspects of this small and vulnerable city state. As with most obituaries, the shortcomings of the Principality are largely placed on one side in favour of an intensely personal and very English reminiscence of ‘this remarkable little state ...”

“... designed to keep us out, to resist recognition; and the lines of its knobs and bluffs and ridges may be deciphered only by those who have been born and bred amongst them. For the rest of us they are edged but also obscured by lovingly named plants, by smilax, trillium, scuppernog vines and plum thickets. And the birds in their midst, the towhees, the ...”

“... themselves about. After all, they already know all the interesting things about genetics, and soon may even understand something about evolution and animal behaviour. There is, however, a secret about modern biology: its fundamental obligation – to describe the living world – has been almost forgotten. Physics knows the exact weight of the electron and the ...”

“... rubber-stamp showing that the book went to war with the troops of fifty years ago. Such searches may soon be unnecessary. In 1988 Carcanet reissued The Crystal Cabinet. Mary Butts’s account of her life as a child and girl in South Dorset. And now, also from Carcanet, we have these stories, which first appeared in the magazines and journals of the Twenties ...”

“... community in New Guinea where males are put through a nine-stage initiation, and adepts may qualify for a further three-stage ritual which, if completed, will confirm the supplicant as a senior elder, privy to knowledge of Afek, the ancestral being. Preliminary phases of sensory deprivation and exclusion from normal society are central elements of ...”

“... Even the undemanding reader who is nodding these assertions into his mind and out again may be held up by the next one: ‘the most complete and perfect example of the former is the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford: a Parthenon-in-the-round, presenting a perfect façade in all directions.’ The circle of the Radcliffe Camera, like the colour circle, one ...”

“... the dragon who waylays the Christian soul. Auden’s flatness here (‘The unpredictable often may/Have sad and cruel results ... ’) is redeemed mainly by his use of something resembling the original alliteration (‘But the same maiden maddened them both ... ’). Together with the extreme grammatical simplicity, this gives the whole translation a kind ...”

“... in Vietnam who were drug addicts, the many Russians who are alcoholics. Just as a neurosis may be not merely the symptom of an illness but also, in itself, an attempt to cure that illness, so the drop-outs from our society, whose symptoms are covered by what I call paganism, may, consciously or unconsciously, be both ...”

“... but on certain issues where he appears to claim originality there is a curious convergence. This may just be accident, but I feel it deserves a mention. But it isn’t just the works of hard-nosed professional gentile anthropologists that are ignored: Jewish authors get similar treatment except at odd moments when they happen to have said something that fits ...”

“... the activity around the anti-Putin protests of the winter and early spring of 2012. A rally on 6 May in Bolotnaya Square, not far from the Kremlin, ended with some pushing and shoving between police and protesters. In the months that followed, the government tightened the screws. Lebedev was arrested in October 2012. In April this year, he was the first to ...”

“... statutory underpinning; but what the House of Commons has just agreed to put on the statute book may not be the underpinning that is required. The parliamentary and press brouhaha has been about setting up an independent panel with the task of ensuring that a voluntary regulator, though established by the very bodies and individuals it is to regulate, will ...”

“... At one point he mentions a notion, derived from the Hellenistic geographer Hipparchus, that there may be humans living as far south as the equator, a realm that, for him, was as inaccessible as an alien planet. But then he turns aside from speculation: ‘Even if these parts are inhabited, as some suppose, they nevertheless form … a lived-in world that is ...”