“... where, in a thick haze of cigarette smoke, the administration of the hospital was thrashed out by means of a clamorous direct democracy. Foot is alert to the ways in which the archive photos of the general meetings conceal as well as reveal. They capture the buzz of mass participation but don’t register the absence of the many patients who chose to remain ...”

“... Chess Championship final between Magnus Carlsen and Ian Nepomniachtchi. All this knock-on sport means there’s a big overlap with the huge sporting events that were always meant to be happening in 2021, such as the British and Irish Lions tour of South Africa, which is the biggest event in rugby outside the quadrennial World Cup, and the T20 World Cup, the ...”

“... in the first of many such declarations of the way things are for women: ‘A husband at home means security, protection. Thieves keep away if a husband is present. Men respect each other. Women neighbours don’t wander in just like that to ask for salt, sugar, much less to bad-mouth the other neighbour. In a husband’s presence, a home is more of a ...”

“... self-denying heroines of earlier children’s literature: the moral had changed from ‘being good means giving up what you want’ to ‘indulging a desire for power brings out the darkness that’s inside you, kids’.The final volume of the first trilogy, The Farthest Shore (1972), ends with Ged going deep into the world of the dead to seal up a hole ...”

“... chimerical. Yet Bate is struck by the fact that Shakespeare seems genuinely able to use Ovid as a means of transcending his immediate historical situation. Ovid’s Actaeon, who gazed on the naked beauty of Diana and was torn to pieces by his dogs, was used by both Jonson and his commentator Sandys for a political purpose; Shakespeare in The Merry Wives of ...”

“... down the suggestion of independence and external appraisal in the word ‘adequate’, so that it means something like ‘accepted’ or ‘operative’. This would give us a theory of morality akin to H.L.A. Hart’s theory of law, set out in The Concept of Law, according to which establishing the existence of a legal obligation on a certain person to do ...”

“... Libya and Morocco. Mubarak’s repression merely delayed it. A cool reckoning of what this means, against the backdrop of the wider region, is in order. A year before the 11 September attacks, Gilles Kepel, in his widely cited book Jihad, argued that the resort by jihadi groups to spectacular acts of violence against the ‘far enemy’ in the West ...”

“... unburrowed and Abercrombie moved east to rebuild Hong Kong. The name ‘Crossrail’ was coined by David Barran, a monocle-wearing, snuff-snorting industrialist, in a 1974 report drawn up at the request of the Department of the Environment. Barran, like Abercrombie, proposed two tunnels, one from London Bridge to Victoria, the other from Paddington to ...”

“... I mean use it in such a way that whatever they mean by it, it excludes what the term actually means. If physicalism is true, experience (consciousness) is wholly physical. For it certainly exists, and everything is wholly physical if physicalism is true. It follows that there are things about the nature of the physical that physics doesn’t ...”

“... folks in all parts of the world.’ These connections have been discussed more recently by David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen in The Kaiser’s Holocaust (2010), and by Juergen Zimmerer in From Windhoek to Auschwitz? (2019). The links between the genocide in South-West Africa and the Holocaust depend on something else that Zimmerer makes clear: the ...”

“... small fry off with razor grins; nothing ain’t change but color and attire ... Walcott evidently means to identify himself with Spoiler. Classically educated and widely travelled, he can’t share in the brave new optimism of Independence and Black Power. He sees the old inequalities persisting – ‘black still poor, though black is beautiful’ – and ...”

“... v. Leviathan’, to borrow Orwell’s own terms, are inclined to hit this over-dramatic, David and Goliath note, including the mandatory weapons-upgrade from slingshot to ‘battered typewriter’ (it wouldn’t do for the typewriter to be newish and in quite good nick). Orwell does seem to have been a brave man when put to the test, but to speak of ...”

“... adopted it in a decorous shape for his longest and most ambitious work, The Moralists. David Hume, whom Diderot befriended in Paris in the 1760s, used it to scandalously sceptical effect in his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, unpublishable until after his death. Diderot’s most famous work is a dialogue: Rameau’s Nephew, in which a ...”

“... the Inspectorate reported in 1995; and again in 1997: ‘the control of train movements by means of a signalling system is absolutely fundamental to the safe running of a railway.’ Yet I can find no evidence that any analysis was done to measure the cost of installing electronic signalling as against the benefit in lives saved. Had it been done, I ...”

“... substance. The form of assembly politics allowed the staging and managing of collective action by means of more or less ritualised behaviour and with a certain regularity; the substance dealt with the relations between ‘rulers and the political community’. A distinctively participatory politics entered European practice and consciousness, not just at the ...”