“... as Wright reminds us, saw the appearance of the first volume of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, which announced, in prose allowing very little latitude of interpretation, that ‘there is and must be in every state a supreme, irresistible, absolute and uncontrolled authority, in which the jura summa imperii, or rights of ...”

“... of clientage networks. From the 1970s early modern revisionists such as Conrad Russell and John Morrill showed that the English Civil War did not arise out of a long-running constitutional dispute centred on the rise of Parliament. Parliaments (the plural is significant) served as points of contact between the centre and the counties and were largely ...”

“... dinner on Christmas Eve with my stepsons and a lavish lunch on Christmas Day with my step-in-laws. We had more feasting on New Year’s Eve. There was a Christmas tree in every house or flat we visited, duly illuminated with coloured lights. The luxury hotels by the Danube are alleged to be for foreigners. I never heard anything except Hungarian spoken ...”

“... legality of laxer rules on interrogation. As Sands shows, Beaver was unaware that Jay Bybee and John Yoo, senior figures in the OLC, had already written a 50-page memo advising that harsher techniques could be used. However, in evidence given to the Senate Judiciary Committee, William Haynes, general counsel in the Department of Defense, studiously avoided ...”

“... North Uist’, and Keith Bosley’s ‘Corolla’; Aidan Carl Mathews’s ‘Severances’, and John Levett’s ‘The Photographs of Paris’. The first two are longish, the others shorter. The only one that won a prize – and that the smallest, £100 – is ‘Corolla’, a sequence of nine exactly rhymed and metred sonnets, culminating in a stunning ...”

“... account he gives. One must assume that ‘economic and social history’ means everything from Sir John Clapham and Max Weber to the theory of mental states, the study of working-class culture, anthropology, demography, political sociology and social psychology, urban history, the study of the family, and the history of science and technology. Would Kenyon’s ...”

“... had, so long as they demean themselves peaceably and quietly with due obedience to His Majesty’s laws and without scandal to his government’, a condition which they had no difficulty in meeting. Similar orders were issued in 1674 and 1685, and in 1700 Solomon de Medina became the first Jew to receive an English knighthood. In David Katz’s words, ‘once ...”

“... Bill, where he studied English and edited the Daily Bruin (Watergate conspirators Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman were his arch-enemies on the paper). By then, he’d already been part of the Allied occupation of Germany pulling bodies out of the rubble, gone AWOL to attend the Nuremberg Trials (with the intention of assassinating Hermann Göring) and worked ...”

“... to colonialism (‘a society sectarianised by the Willimite confiscations and the Penal Laws’). This leaves the term unexamined, along with the politics of the Irish Churches themselves. Nor was Ireland the only corner of Europe where the Reformation (and Counter-Reformation) had divisive cultural and political consequences. The anthology’s most ...”

“... be a precursor of Hobbes’s Leviathan – that other ‘confusion of a man and a whale’, as John Bramhall (one of Hobbes’s early critics) described it – and Hobbes, who knew Donne, may have had the poet’s image in mind. Bramhall almost certainly did, taking Donne’s account of the conspiracy of the swordfish and the thresher fish against the ...”

“... John Sutherland has produced ‘a calendar following a series of events (mostly trials) from 1960 to the present day’, which deals briefly and brightly with obscenity cases from Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Fanny Hill to The Romans in Britain.* The aim is to investigate changes in public attitudes to ‘offensive literature ...”

“... Peel’s government failed to carry its own backbenchers with it over the repeal of the Corn Laws. Though the Tory MPs who voted for protection were a majority in the Party, the Free Traders had a clear majority in the House of Commons as a whole, since the Peelites were supported by the Whigs. Indeed, the subsequent formation of the Liberal ...”

“... science’ – the modern science of the mind, and of possible minds. The idea that there might be laws of thought transcending our intelligence is rooted in antiquity; Aristotelian logic was long regarded as a statement of such laws, and in modern times the mathematical logician feels free to ignore the feebleness of human ...”

“... dilemma: how could reason play an effective part in a physical world governed by uniform natural laws? How could thinking make a difference in reality? His solution, which involved an immaterial ‘mind or soul’ interacting with the brain, may well be as ridiculous as most people now think; but the general argument – that an understanding of the brain ...”

“... and OK! magazine. Not that external regulation has worked either. Recent disclosures, including John Yates’s frank admission that his failure to reopen the hacking investigation in 2009 was ‘pretty crap’, suggest that police action against reporters’ malfeasance is as hopeless as the PCC’s. As Stewart Tendler, a Times crime reporter, put ...”