“... on each child some particular writing, or other distinguishing mark or token, so that the child may be known thereafter if necessary’. By 1790, 18,000 of these objects had been collected; women had continued to leave them for decades after they were replaced by paper receipts in 1760. The Victorians exhibited some of the old tokens, and accidentally ...”

“... shot through with around ten million nerve endings, and by rubbing tusks on meeting, the narwhals may be passing on information about the salinity (and therefore propensity to freeze) of the water through which they have just passed; not aggressors, then, but Mercators. The horns may also be an aid to courtship; a positive ...”

“... I should take her by the elbow and see her safely back to the church she was made for. Yet one may never see her so clearly again. Mary, handsome, strong, leaning against the door frame, her great baby, more a child really, balanced on her hip, and the elderly, barefoot pilgrims she looks down at – all well lit, not seen as they are in the church, in the ...”

“... while Talbot finds his person and his obsequiousness repulsive. In this ship the quarterdeck may be walked upon only by invitation, and the Captain is not to be spoken to first: standing orders to this effect are posted up but neither Talbot nor Colley reads them and both disobey the rules. Talbot, by flourishing his godfather, gets away with it and is ...”

“... yet another ‘last avant garde’, the Situationists, and also formally dissolved his group (in May ’68). Tel Quel had no relations with these competitors at the time, but seems to have posthumously (and perhaps abusively) canonised Debord. The quotation gives them ambiguous aid and comfort, for it is unclear whether Sollers’s group should be identified ...”

“... law, but cannot prevent government from changing the law, whatever the nature of the change. It may be that, at least in cases where clear evidence emerges, the courts have the jurisdiction to stop the use of government powers for party political ends. There is no reason in principle why an order of prohibition should not be used to prevent a minister from ...”

“... philosophers, have pored over such matters in order to understand the world; and one or two may have come round to his conclusion, that the point is to change it. This seems an unlikely role in which to cast Roy Jenkins. But when the urbane biographer of Asquith undertook the 1979 Dimbleby Lecture (now reprinted in The Rebirth of Britain) he was clearly ...”

“... must always have been striking, although not in James Beck’s view. Ilaria, Beck concedes, ‘may look “Gothic” ’ – as if we were about to claim that she actually was Gothic. Indeed, her narrow, high-collared dress, belted below the breast, with long curving folds falling from belt to feet is Gothic – but, who knows, she might be less so if she ...”

“... had ‘wittingly’ spied on Americans – a lie for which he has never been held to account. In May 2017, he told NBC’s Chuck Todd that the Russians were highly likely to have colluded with Trump’s campaign because they are ‘almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favour, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique’. The current ...”

“... In a letter of May 1919 Hardy told his friend Sir George Douglas he hadn’t been doing much, ‘mainly destroying old papers’. ‘How they raise ghosts,’ he added. He was still at it in September when he complained of the ‘dismal work’ of destroying papers that were of ‘absolutely no use for any purpose God or man’s ...”

“... or another. Yet even from the restricted sample quoted something else, not so easily classified, may spring to the eye. Most such ethno-nationalist conflicts seem to happen in predominantly rural situations. Nor are they rural merely in the sense of being agricultural or non-urban – like East Anglia, say, or the Beauce plain in central France – they are ...”

“... in a play that deals with the private act of love and the public role of childbearing. But there may be a further dimension of meaning. Paulina in The Winter’s Tale struggles to get the imprisoned Queen’s newborn infant out past the jailer: This Childe was prisoner to the wombe, and is By Law and processe of great Nature, thence Free’d and ...”

“... its use, whether state of war or threat of war or any other public emergency; none of these may be invoked as a justification. Orders from superiors are explicitly excluded as a defence, and moreover the Convention requires that wherever the torture occurred and whatever the nationality of the torturer or victim, parties must prosecute or extradite ...”

“... but a defence of the freedom of poets to write as, and what, they wish. No big problem, you may think. But suppose poetry was not the minority pursuit it has become in Britain today. Suppose it was the most popular form of entertainment available, the nearest equivalent to our mass media. That is not far from the truth about the world in which Plato ...”

“... rhetoric. I am not trying to underplay the practical, political and economic disasters that may face us, from what on earth will happen on the Irish border to where the Welsh farmers will sell their sheep. But we do need to attend also to the cheap, fruitless, repetitive and wordy stand-off we have descended to.On the one hand, there are those whose ...”