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“... plague also discredited the leaders of society, its governors, priests and intellectuals, and the laws and theories supported by them. These elites were obviously failing in their prime social function, the defence of the common welfare, in the name of which they enjoyed their privileges.’19 ...”

“... gain their political freedom and autonomy.’ Which is to say: size matters. Or, as Kant wrote, ‘laws always lose in vigour what governments gain in extent; hence a condition of sullen despotism falls into anarchy after stifling the seeds of good.’ This is a refrain which sounds somewhere in the background of most thinking about politics: states should not ...”

“... hundred years of worrying about corporate responsibility has produced an enormous patchwork of laws and regulations trying to define it – and a vast army of lawyers and accountants trying to redefine it – but there has been little progress in understanding what goes on inside the black box of the corporate mind. What does Uber want? We could still be ...”

“... technocrats became adept at presenting their policies as merely the application of the ‘laws’ of economic ‘science’. The racist rhetoric of the 1920s gave way to talk of level playing fields, ‘emerging markets’ and the universal goals of competition, productivity and efficiency. The losers were those who supposedly failed to keep up with ...”

“... not an axion in sight.Others have wondered whether taking account of dark matter requires that the laws of gravity themselves be altered. For more than a hundred years, physicists and astronomers have tried to make sense of the universe by using Einstein’s general theory of relativity. It explains all the phenomena we associate with gravity – from the fall ...”

“... long and less than two miles wide. Sark has its own parliament, its own taxes and its own traffic laws (permitting only tractors, bikes and horse-drawn vehicles). Its central, fertile plateau is protected by cliffs on almost all sides that rise to over three hundred feet. There are no natural harbours. In 1862, the lords of the Admiralty of the world’s ...”

“... a prophylactic distance. The SDP/Liberal Alliance is judged to have ‘foundered on the pique of David Steel and the pride of David Owen’: it is not clear why a note to this effect had to be appended to this other parody of Woddis’s, for the parody itself implies as much. Or as little, since there are those of us who ...”

“... immigrants dropped: when employment increased, so did the number of immigrants. When immigration laws were in prospect, a ‘flood’ of immigrants came in to anticipate the restrictions, and not only adult males but their dependants too. Thus those who had come with the intention of only staying temporarily now brought over their wives and their ...”

“... from Louis XVI, troubled Congress: a gift wasn’t necessarily a bribe, but it could become one. Laws governing how much money individuals and organisations could give to politicians were prophylactics, designed – however imperfectly – to prevent corruption by limiting how much money could change hands. Then, in 2010, the Supreme Court ‘effectively ...”

“... was anecdotal evidence of abuse of the present system by a handful of asylum-seekers; but, as David Heath MP pointed out, the normal way of dealing with abuse of a system is to put an end to the abuse, not the system. Only the year before, a high-speed process of statutory review by the High Court had been instituted. In the course of an unusually loud ...”

“... the press that Derek Jeter, the Yankees’ shortstop, a nice, inoffensive boy with cheekbones, the David Beckham of baseball, had promised him that ‘the ghosts would turn up eventually’. The Red Sox were at least spared the indignity of having their misfortunes blamed on some hapless idiot whose glove happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong ...”

“... David Bindman does not think that Hogarth was joking when he gave one of his contemporaries, John Nichols, a comic demonstration of minimalism: it took the form of a diagram composed of three lines and he claimed that it contained his memory of ‘a Sergeant with his pike going into an Ale House, and his Dog following ...”

“... in an eternity of vain research along endless shelves.’ Jump forward seventy years, and for David Lodge’s Pooteresque Adam Appleby, the BM is a cosy, quintessentially safe asylum. Adam’s working life there is a matter of daily comforting rituals, as when he cools his research-fevered brow on the downstairs men’s lavatory cistern. The BM shelters ...”

“... The story can fairly be summarised since its meaning and power are vested in the telling. It is David Plante’s manner that will attract or alienate readers. The Country exemplifies a mode of contemporary writing almost sufficiently distinct to constitute a genre. The defining characteristic of a novel of this kind is that it seems to consist substantially ...”

“... South Africa through a European-style industrial revolution compressed into twenty years. David Goldblatt (b.1930) began taking photographs in the gold-mining areas in his teens. Many of them, and the ones that followed, tell the story of South Africa’s labouring classes, predominantly black, in a world shaped by race ...”