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THE hints were all around Johnny Kingdom, if he gave it thought. Whenever he dug a grave, there was always a robin about. When he took a break, laying down his spade, pick and shovel, he liked to watch the ivy-clad churchyard walls where the blackbirds nested and where snails took shelter in the heat of the day.

EVERY writer overuses a word or two. Johnson’s weakness is “fascinating”. Kate Fox’s pop-anthropology book “Watching the English” uses the word “liminal” 24 times in about 500 pages.

IT IS a common belief that human rights and democracy must prevail because they are noble and good. The world’s benighted multitudes yearn for freedom and one day will win it. Robert Kagan, a historian, thinks that is a dangerous fantasy.

ON A breezy summer’s evening in 1988, officers of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, gathered in a north London garden to toast Russia’s humiliating retreat from Afghanistan.

THE narrator of this offbeat whodunnit describes herself and her fellow misfits as “the sort of people whom the world regards as useless”. Yet “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” is a warning not to underestimate the lowly.

THIS summer Ganesh Gaitonde’s eyes burned through the monsoon haze from billboards across the metropolis. The fictional gangster, played with seductive menace by Nawazuddin Siddiqui, is one of the heroes of “Sacred Games”, Netflix’s flagship Indian drama series.