“... elect a master and two wardens every year. For the Stationers, Blayney writes, the charter was a means ‘to enforce their new commercial monopoly’. For the Crown, it was part of a broader attempt to regulate the printing industry, and accompanied a Marian purge of a book trade previously dominated by printers ‘who owed their commercial success to the ...”

“... rowdy teenagers on their estates, the victims of Harold Shipman (whose suicide apparently tempted David Blunkett to ‘open a bottle’). Often, these people are defenceless because they are powerless, and they are powerless because they are poor, less well educated and culturally marginalised. And yet they are still British, and deserving of the state’s ...”

“... may run dry for political reasons that are not the courts’ business. The majority see it as the means prescribed by Parliament by which EU law is introduced into domestic law: ‘So long as the 1972 Act remains in force, its effect is to constitute EU law an independent and overriding source of domestic law.’From these two approaches flow either of two ...”

“... answer would include the English victory at Neville’s Cross the same year, which ended with King David II of Scotland a prisoner in the Tower, to be joined ten years later, after Poitiers, by King John II of France. Some might argue – and professional historians no doubt prefer multi-factored answers – that the tide turned even earlier, in 1332, at the ...”

“... that have held particular power over our imaginations. She admits an allergy to the latent.This means that her love fantasies follow a predictable pattern. Each chapter begins with some combination of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero or Augustine. As we might expect from a medieval historian, she then looks at texts from early Christian ...”

“... lasted so long – as a naked empress.’ There was, they say, always an alternative: simply no means of effecting it. And the alternative was not what the Labour Party purportedly stood for in the early Eighties. Unlike the contributors to New Times, furthermore, most here do assume (openly or tacitly) that the Labour Party is now the only practicable ...”

“... of course, there were the young directors whom Wheldon fostered: John Schlesinger, Ken Russell, David Jones, Peter Newington, Humphrey Burton. They were encouraged, chivvied, and in Russell’s case restrained from some of his wilder excesses, all in the cause of demonstrating the nature of art by means of films which ...”

“... with divine authority over the Church. The Puritans generally supported the royal supremacy as the means to keep Popery down. But what happened if, as under Mary Tudor or Charles I, it was used not to suppress Popery but to promote it? There is a persistent opportunism in the conduct of England’s various Protestant groups towards the State’s control of the ...”

“... were either soured by authorial complaints against Olwyn Hughes, Ted Hughes and the Estate (e.g. David Holbrook, Edward Butscher) or have come to nothing (e.g. Lois Ames, Harriet Rosenstein). Most of the book-length literary criticism is unimpressive. There isn’t much to choose, for example, between Margaret Dickie Uroff (‘As they developed, Plath came ...”

“... what you have got or can get, so long as you rightfully acquired it: where ‘rightfully’ often means not much more than ‘without breaking the law’, if that. Some philosophers see the disputes between such ideas as embodying two different views of society, which genuinely compete with each other and mobilise different ethical conceptions of ...”

“... the military? Of the poor Brits, we hear barely a squeak. It was the same when Major came to Camp David just before Christmas – he could as well have been travelling incognito. I think myself that Mrs Thatcher grew so sensitive to the cry of ‘Reagan’s poodle’ that she never failed to give tone and colour and visibility to the favours she undertook for ...”

“... Bubushkin is its lengthy sampling of Vera’s, very infrequently Igor’s, private diaries – a means of recovering the missing dates of the letter sequence, and so completing an historical record from 1921 to the composer’s death on 6 April 1971. Robert Craft tells us that Vera’s diaries if published entire would amount to a ‘book or books of great ...”

“... Hill’s need not exactly to spell but to articulate the word ‘atonement’ differently when he means at-one-ment is tacitly an admission that the two, the same and not the same, will always be magnetically held apart and held together by being like-poles. Kipling’s McAndrew discerned a Calvinistic predestination in ‘the stride o’ yon ...”

“... and as long as our environmental consciousness is tied to the idea of breathtaking scenery or David Attenborough’s ramblings about charismatic fauna, we will be satisfied with the preservation of beautiful symbols. Activists chain themselves to trees while Coca-Cola appeases guilty consciences by printing some arrows in a Möbius loop on the label of a ...”

“... intellectual inspiration Friedrich Hayek wrote in 1979. ‘Nobody knows what it actually means.’ Hayek was in no doubt that patterns emerged in the behaviour of populations, and might eventually lead to a form of large-scale self-organisation. The best way of ensuring this happened was to build a communications infrastructure that would make it ...”