“... the life energy of the ayahuasca plants, which are absorbed by those who drink the brew. Kené means simply ‘design’, but the patterns themselves are far from simple, with thick lines forming complex grids that are filled by series of finer lines. To Western eyes, they resemble the maze-like etchings on an electronic chip.Kené aren’t straightforward ...”

“... said they were about to present a ‘take it or leave it’ deal. The director of Mossad, David Barnea, travelled back to Doha. He said Israel was ready to withdraw from the so-called Philadelphi corridor (along Gaza’s southern border) in a potential deal. But hours later, Netanyahu gave a televised address in which he said that Israel must occupy ...”

“... garlic, and John Minton’s seductive, and faintly Post-Impressionist, illustrations to Elizabeth David. Brooke, after the war, heads for the Mediterranean as fast as he possibly can, but, being Brooke, he is already deeply nostalgic for his Army days there and strives to reanimate certain epiphanic moments – with no success whatever. In his largely ...”

“... and not simply about members of religious orders: Benedictines do not seem to suffer from it. David Knowles wrote a history of the monks and friars in medieval England that was instantly recognised as a masterpiece, but I can’t quite see a Jesuit pulling off something similar – though on a smaller scale John O’Malley’s The First Jesuits ...”

“... in all) arrived promising that their magic formulae would solve the ‘demographic problem’. The means varied from reducing Israeli control over the Occupied Territories – in fact, the plans put forward by Labour, Kadima, Shas (the Sephardic Orthodox party) and Gil (the pensioners’ party) would involve Israeli withdrawal from only 50 per cent of these ...”

“... Rather than a ‘narrator’, however, it might make sense to speak of the book having, as David Hayman has suggested of Ulysses, an ‘Arranger’ – ‘something between a persona and a function, somewhere between the narrator and the implied author’. This isn’t an entirely gratuitous comparison: Emerald Germs of Ireland is a more Joycean book ...”

“... of England series and to the publications of a few academics, notably Malcolm Baker and the late David Bindman. In a recent conference at the V&A, several foreign research students gave excellent papers on little-known sculptural masterpieces in English churches. There was no greater portrait statue erected in 18th-century Europe than Louis-François ...”

“... unstable relationship with race.The show opens with two large flags hanging from the ceiling. David Hammons’s African American Flag (1990) hangs behind Chris Ofili’s Black British version; both recast symbols of empire and the nation-state in the colours of Pan-Africanism: red, black and green. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W.E.B. Du Bois wrote ...”

“... wasn’t the purpose of power for Johnson. In these circumstances, compassion was power, a means and not an end. Perhaps the person who saw this best was another of the dominant political figures of the age, though someone who barely gets a walk-on part in this volume. Martin Luther King told his supporters, who were fearful of what a Texan like ...”

“... however much they privately object to land grabs; and its use of protracted negotiations as a means of buying time. Raz’s book is about the conquest of time as much as it is about the conquest of territory: the fruitless peace processing of the last two decades is only the latest chapter of his story. The road to war – and conquest – began in April ...”

“... the sin of facility. Most important, the forms of patronage that made avant-gardism a reliable means of insertion in a ‘prevailing’ discourse, and the political contexts in which this was possible, no longer exist. Low-paid day jobs or faculty teaching posts have kept too many of Sinclair’s unworldly contributors at a remove from anything resembling ...”

“... one – doesn’t always occur. Still the reopening of the village shop as a community enterprise means that I (and my stick) can once again trudge down for the paper (as I do in London with much less effort on my bike).12 April, Yorkshire. The sheep round us have always seemed to me an unprepossessing lot, lank, shabby and not to be spruced up even for a ...”

“... of the many recent bad news stories about the NHS, its significance underscored by the fact that David Cameron felt it necessary to present the report to the House of the Commons himself, rather than leave it to the secretary of state for health. The public inquiry was set up in 2010 by the then secretary of state, Andrew Lansley, to investigate further the ...”

“... which leads to malpractice litigation on the institutional level. But litigation is not by any means the only form of recourse, and in many situations it is the worst, locking the patient or the family into years of anxiety and uncertainty. The book traces the heterogeneous and sometimes byzantine procedures and agencies through which questions can be ...”

“... but he did not fully resolve it, even implicitly. Roughly, I know what ‘That tree is green’ means by knowing, among other things, what ‘is green’ means; but my knowledge of what ‘is green’ means consists in my knowing what it means to ...”