“... Upper Amazon (2009), Stephan Beyer speculates that the combination of plants in the ayahuasca brew may have been developed for its spectacular purgative qualities as much as its visionary ones.The global spread of ayahuasca has been driven by two overlapping beliefs in its possibilities: as a life-changing spiritual experience and as a miraculous healing ...”

“... David Attenborough​ was born in 1926, the same year as Marilyn Monroe, Fidel Castro and Elizabeth II. He began hosting Zoo Quest on BBC television in 1954; not quite seventy years later, his latest series, Wild Isles, has just finished airing (it’s still available on iPlayer, or Amazon Prime for those outside the UK ...”

“... died of before. Men dying in the time it takes to catch and throw off a cold: ‘One Thursday,’ David France writes in How to Survive a Plague, ‘sexy Tommy McCarthy from the classifieds department stayed out late at an Yma Sumac concert. Friday he had a fever. Sunday he was hospitalised. Wednesday he was dead.’ Later, there were tests. A virus ...”

“... that his lack of a tough environmental policy makes that gesture rather empty. To sift through David Miliband’s cheerful blog at Defra (www.davidmiliband.defra.gov.uk) is to know that someone in this administration is taking the risks of climate disaster as seriously as they deserve to be taken. In a lecture to the Audit Commission in July, Miliband put ...”

“... frequently); others where what is special is an eerie suburban ordinariness (David Lynch’s small-town America). Doig’s landscapes, to a greater degree than most you might include in an anthology of painted and filmed scenery, suggest a surprising discovery about to be made, rather than something that’s been imposed on an amenable ...”

“... to the underground government facility newly photographed in large-format full colour by David Moore. The Last Things (Dewi Lewis, £25) opens with an anonymous quote – ‘Ministry of Defence official, London 2007’ – that reads: ‘I don’t understand how you’ve got this far.’ What follows is a series of shots of unpeopled hallways and ...”

“... fortune through some startling and, on occasion, clandestine publishing and movie contracts, as David Reynolds has shown in his riveting In Command of History. Then there is self-justification after retirement, which almost always produces memoirs of numbing boredom: I assume – or hope – that no one alive has actually read every page of all the volumes ...”

“... until 2010, followed by five years as Miliband’s shadow chancellor, before losing his seat last May aged 48. His defeat, announced at 7 a.m., was the perfect conclusion to Labour’s terrible night: the man the polls predicted would be setting the next Budget was instead out on his ear. Now, a year on, in addition to becoming a lecturer at Harvard and ...”

“... as fast as style, and film is a merciless medium. But certain frozen styles have their appeal, and David Hemmings, as Thomas, owner of the Rolls and famous photographer who was in the flophouse collecting images for a book, is as impressively sulky and obtuse as he always was. I don’t think I had noticed previously how distracted he is throughout the ...”

“... exhibition Constable to Delacroix: British Art and the French Romantics (at Tate Britain until 11 May). It makes it easier to relish the dramatics of Horace Vernet’s Mazeppa, to see that there is more than nice observation of weather in Paul Huet’s picture of a lonely rider, Storm at the End of the Day.Dumas’s novel mixes operatic themes with the odd ...”

“... as from their kinetic extravagance. Auerbach’s achievement is formidable. Unlike his teacher, David Bomberg, whose diverse stylistic excursions seem to test his talent as though he feared he had missed its true direction, Auerbach has followed a single line. His life’s work hangs together – the most recent pictures developing ideas about painting ...”

“... for an audience newly exposed to it as abstraction would be later.When you abandon stories you may still have a message. The aspects of nature that dwarf us can suggest other powers beyond our grasp. In Russia, pictures of plains and forests, snow, sun and thaw, were evocations of the motherland. The emotions they played on were consonant, at least ...”

“... the uncontainable. He is the politician who has turned tenacity into an art form. Where others may weary, falter and even stumble, he persists. Successive prime ministers, including those on his own side of the party divide, have flinched at the sight of his form rising from Westminster’s back benches. While no premier would choose to see himself as ...”

“... a certain stiffening of dogma which carries it along all the more authoritatively. Her downfall may be due to drink and social pressures, and yet the novel inexorably shows that Jenny is the sort of girl – and not a bad sort either – who is bound for trouble. Today she would be a one-parent family with a permanent entourage of social workers. The last ...”

“... was not invariably all that different from the rest of Europe. By the same token, Mrs Thatcher may believe that Magna Carta secured liberty more effectively than did the French Revolution. But there has as yet been no revival of a British history emphasising native constitutional achievements. Indeed, some of the most unabashed Tory historians seem far ...”