“... most ancient form of jury in English history – the jury of inquest – was shorn of effective powers. And in a sweeping series of clauses, the option of trial by jury – or, in the old language, ‘putting oneself on one’s country’ – was removed in many categories of case where the option had previously been open. Such cases, which include many ...”

“... a terrifyingly deformed portrait can be consigned to the attic, so can the diarist exert all his powers of literary subterfuge to hide the truth from his reader and from himself. The chronicle begins in 1897 when Arthur Benson was 35 and a housemaster at Eton, and continues to his death as Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge in 1925, at the age of 63. He ...”

“... and Southey’s attempts to found a Utopian community in Pennsylvania, the political career of Thomas Jefferson’s Vice-President Aaron Burr, Southey’s own epic Madoc, the entire history of Western philosophy – but the poem’s bewildering imaginative scope and range of reference are continually focused by Muldoon’s insistence on the multiple ...”

“... So it’s pretty clear who the author has in mind when he equips his characters with uncanny powers of cultural precognition. Gibson’s career as a zeitgeist-wrangler got off to an impressive start when his science fiction novels – starting with Neuromancer (1984) – hammered out some sturdy templates for pop-cultural dystopianism. Ridley Scott’s ...”

“... work. Four years later it returned to private enterprise, when the City handed over its public powers to a goldsmith called Hugh Myddelton, whose name still adorns the streets of Islington. Three years after that it became a public-private initiative, with James I underwriting half the costs in return for half the profits. In 1631, Charles I was persuaded ...”

“... currency for every Eurozone country,’ the French economist Michel Aglietta and his co-author, Thomas Brand, write in Un New Deal pour l’Europe. ‘It binds them to rigidly fixed exchange rates, regardless of their underlying economic realities, and strips them of monetary autonomy.’ For Aglietta, a currency is essentially a social contract: behind it ...”

“... enforces them and administers the body politic, using a mass of statutory and prerogative powers. You could abolish the monarchy and substitute the state for the crown in all our laws and textbooks and (apart from the unappealing prospect of presidential elections) nothing much would change. For all that, there is more than one kind of monarch, and ...”

“... on 8 September 1951, specifies: ‘Except as otherwise provided in the present Treaty, the Allied Powers waive all reparations claims of the Allied Powers, other claims of the Allied Powers and their nationals arising out of any actions taken by Japan and its nationals in the course of ...”

“... certainly had. It was ostensibly about the unnecessary duration of the decree and the abuse of the powers it created; but neither of these features distinguished it from the measures adopted in response to other such risings. What gave the outrage a focus was that Eyre had personally authorised the arrest in Kingston of a man named George Gordon, and what ...”

“... that had come about since their last sojourn. In 1292, in Shropshire, Alice Knotte complained that Thomas Champeneys ‘detaineth from her seven shillings in money and a surcoat of the value of three shillings’. ‘Alice can get no justice at all,’ she protested, ‘seeing that she is poor and that this Thomas is ...”

“... the tribunes of the plebs (who were elected by the people, or some of them at least, and had powers of veto over the decisions of the Senate, consuls and other magistrates). Sulla resigned the dictatorship in 79 and retired to the countryside near Naples, where he died the following year. His dictatorship ended, the power of the consuls – two were ...”

“... Great writers usually do, nonetheless. ‘Fame wants to find safety,’ as Canetti has put it. Thomas Mann was notorious for his self-importance and his suspicion of anyone whom he felt might be detecting signs of weakness in him; Thomas Hardy spent his last days writing venomously bad verses against fellow authors whom ...”

“... Macquarie, or its near neighbour the Bogan, must be the unnamed river that figures, and floods, in Thomas Keneally’s new novel. Keneally, too, has mythic ambitions. His heroine, Kate, born Gaffney, married Kozinski, is escaping from a failed marriage and a consequent disaster so appalling we are not told what it is for fear that the disclosure might ...”

“... led by such avatars as Alan Everitt, Peter Laslett, J. H. Plumb, Lawrence Stone, Keith Thomas and E. P. Thompson, now constitutes a substantial body of knowledge that has transformed our conception both of British history and of what constitutes legitimate historical inquiry. The modish topics of birth and death, the ...”

“... adults and turned to children. Another deterrent to continuing with poetry was the script which Thomas Arnold had written for his sons – their ‘destiny’. Matthew, Tom, William: they all, more or less rebelliously, accepted that theirs must be a life of useful toil – they became educationists. In his second published poem, ‘Cromwell’ (‘a prize ...”