“... about climate change and mass extinction feed fears of imminent catastrophe. These uncertainties may help to explain historians’ current preoccupation with temporality. Yet in his conclusion, Clark reminds us that the fear of apocalypse is itself cyclical, and finds in Emmanuel Macron a figure not unlike the Great Elector, for whom solidarity between the ...”

“... and swiftly recover. But they become carriers all the same, infecting others, some of whom may belong to the unlucky 1 or 2 per cent – there is great dispute about the fatality rate among victims of Covid-19 – who will feel the virus’s full destructive impact. Methods of combating the two viruses are similar: when the queen visited Australia ...”

“... takes pains to ensure that its interests are never endangered by such high-mindedness. Merkel may like to warn against the dangers posed by populists such as Marine Le Pen, but meanwhile her party cosies up to far-right authoritarians like Viktor Orbán, who allow German factories in Hungary to operate with what one observer called ‘Chinese ...”

“... of A-Level rundown on the ‘background’. Thus we get, repeatedly, this kind of thing: ‘Hume may be regarded as the father of philosophical atheism. His assault on religion was twofold. First he sought to show that ...’ Also, running through the book, there is a too determined jokiness, an insistent watch-my-speed: ‘This is not an address to Chloe or ...”

“... fiction – it’s something that can easily be lost. Our first encounter with an alien species may be one in which we feel acutely embarrassed by our decline.‘The Machine in Shaft Ten’, published in New Worlds in 1972 under the pseudonym Joyce Churchill, takes a similarly bleak view of our place in the universe. A vast machine is discovered at the ...”

“... the shock of death and the shock of happiness. Yves claims to have inherited a family greeting: ‘May your death come as a shock to you.’ He presents it as an act of well-wishing, although it sounds menacing when he says it. The shock of happiness is Tommy’s idea. In the Uber from Frank’s place, he launches into a three-page monologue on the nature of ...”

“... Fatty food is tasty. Oils are rubbed into the skin for pleasure, relaxation and healing. They may also act as a medium to connect the body with a realm beyond the corporeal. The British monarch is anointed at the coronation to signify the sacred nature of monarchy and its place as part of a divine order. In the Catholic Church, Supreme Unction at the ...”

“... of among other things ‘psychogeography’, were a moving force behind the événements of May 1968, while in England the earth mysteries movement reawoke interest in ley lines, causing considerable annoyance to the Ministry of Works with its activities at Stonehenge. Graham Robb’s archaeo-psycho-geographical-antiquarian bicycle tour of France has ...”

“... don’t start working seriously on their close control by the time they’re nine or ten, they may never catch up.) This means that basketball players sometimes get normal childhoods, and can emerge suddenly into stardom from relatively ordinary backgrounds – a possibility strengthened by the fact that the NBA recruits its talent not from specialised ...”

“... Macaulay’s words, to ‘exact from [them] a promise that he will put a Veto on laws which [they] may hereafter think necessary to the wellbeing of the country’. In fact, the debates of the Convention Parliament show that the politicians of the day were seeking to fetter the King in his executive capacity – that is to say, to prevent him behaving like ...”

“... the usual chatter and country music that were staples of the show, and in that furnace blast of a May morning in south central Texas – Christopher read aloud, first in German, then in his own English translation, Goethe’s ‘Night Thoughts’ of 1781: Stars, you are unfortunate, I pity you, Beautiful as you are, shining in your glory, Who guide seafaring ...”

“... so that even in the course of a single exhibition, like the one currently at Tate Modern (until 6 May), we begin to feel that we too are sitting down at the old kitchen table for our morning coffee. ‘Dining Room in the Country’ (1913) Intimacy (Bonnard and Vuillard were both thought of as intimistes by contemporaries) has a peculiar relationship to ...”

“... of delimitation, turned the song of others (which might be very bad) into an artwork.’Banalities may be degraded – they are made to be circulated and consumed – but in that process they are also rendered common. They indicate a buried kind of cultural commons (the ‘ban’ in ‘banal’ points to the common as that which is often denigrated), which can ...”

“... subject to instruction: keep the tone of your letters happy, they were told, however unhappy you may be. Write about day-to-day matters and be sure to tell the men about the outpouring of support for the troops at home. ‘Girls,’ one agony aunt wrote, ‘your most important job is to keep up Bill’s ego and his morale.’ In the face of the dehumanising ...”

“... trapped colonised peoples in relations of dependency. Smiles was impatient with structures. ‘It may be of comparatively little consequence how a man is governed from without,’ he wrote, because ‘everything depends upon how he governs himself from within.’ The nation, for example, was ‘only an aggregate of individual conditions’. And ‘no ...”