“... has a telos: the fulfilment of the prophecy that the Messiah would be a descendant of the House of David. This precludes the pyrotechnic genealogical loops of the pagan gods, but it also illustrates the problem of genealogy more generally. Where to start and who to include? The Gospel of Luke takes the lineal patriarchal story back to Adam, which makes us all ...”

“... in the Falklands War earlier that year. The unions’ postwar heyday was already over. Further laws followed in 1984, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1990 and 1992. Often euphemistically called Employment Acts, the new laws first restricted or ended the unions’ most expansive powers: the closed shop, which made union membership ...”

“... image handed down in history books and conversation, which is plainly not good enough.’ It is David Bromwich’s aim in The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke that people should know a good deal more about what Burke actually said and wrote. This is the first of two projected volumes; the second will cover the two great causes of Burke’s later life: the ...”

“... to fry). To write about the works of Hazlitt, one needs a bias towards history and philosophy. David Bromwich’s study concentrates on the latter discipline, for he is appraising Hazlitt’s understanding of Abstract Ideas and his command of words to express them. But there is also a historical theme running through this excellent book, accompanying the ...”

“... continuities but he has no gift for history’s great sweeps and swoops. And as a layer-down of laws, he rarely inspires confidence: he is forever shuttling between received opinion (received, mostly, from his hero, Donald Davie), and ill-balanced subjectivity. Admittedly, Johnson himself was unreliable, but with him we are usually more interested in the ...”

“... superiors and working on short-term contracts – for whose protection the sexual harassment laws were specifically designed. As ever, it is the class element in this dismal narrative that bears watching.On Whitewater, it has become quite the liberal fashion to say that no laws were broken and that the investigation ...”

“... the teaching burden of thirty to forty hours a week which he had hitherto endured. But he was, David Boucher tells us, as intellectually isolated within his own university as he was from the broader philosophical currents represented by Russell. His chief influences came from quite elsewhere – notably, from the Italian idealists, Croce, Gentile and de ...”

“... own study until October 2020, following the demonstrations inspired by the murder of George Floyd. David W. Blight, director of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Centre for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, was chosen to lead the Yale and Slavery Research Project. The result is Yale and Slavery, an analytical narrative that considers institutional ...”

“... Vernon Howell​ – better known as David Koresh – arrived at Mount Carmel, the Texas base of a Seventh Day Adventist splinter sect called the Branch Davidians, in the summer of 1981. He was 21 years old and looking for a new church. A ‘wandering bonehead’, as he would later describe himself, he had been kicked out of a mainstream Seventh Day Adventist congregation in Tyler, Texas for having sex with the 15-year-old daughter of a church elder (or at least trying to), and for refusing to stop haranguing church leaders about the correct interpretation of scripture ...”

“... the elect separated out from the reprobate? Even ‘Calvinism’ was ticklish. As David Hall points out, not all Calvinists shared the same eschatology, disagreeing about what happened to souls after death.The question of whether to award the capital ‘P’ or not remains a subject of contention among historians. For Hall, a history professor ...”

“... right of others.’ Nevertheless, he treats evil elsewhere as due mainly to a defiance of natural laws, laws obvious to reflection: ‘we are not led to discover them, by difficult speculations, intricate disquisitions, or long experience, but are led to them, equally by our passions and our reason, in prosperity and ...”

“... Jr was a serious student of philosophy and theology, drawing on the writings of Gandhi and Henry David Thoreau to develop a powerful justification for disobedience to unjust laws. At a time when only 2 per cent of the Black population had graduated from college, King exemplified the ‘talented tenth’ to whom W.E.B. Du ...”

“... from the English public through the Barnett formula. ‘Allowing the Scots to make their own laws, while freeriding on English taxpayers … is simply unjust,’ Johnson wrote in the Telegraph in 2001. ‘They will come cap in hand to Uncle Sugar in London,’ he went on. ‘And when they do, I propose that we tell them to hop it.’ Some political small ...”

“... of Article 1 of the 1689 Bill of Rights, which declares that ‘the pretended power of suspending laws or the execution of laws by regall authority without consent of Parlyament is illegall.’ Law is, it seems, everywhere. Sumption returns to the issue in his lecture entitled ‘Human Rights and Wrongs’, but only in ...”

“... Civil War would not have taken place.’ Johnson manages to ignore the work of Edmund Morgan, David Brion Davis and numerous other scholars of the past thirty years who have demonstrated that slavery was an intrinsic element of American life almost from the beginning of the colonial era, and that it imparted a powerful exclusionary dimension to the ...”