“... broadcaster in the Middle East and North Africa. While Dubai has specialised in loose banking laws and gated tourism, Qatar has settled on sport as the most effective way of drawing attention and visitors. Since the turn of the century, Doha has been a regular stop on the global tennis and cycling circuits, and has hosted dozens of world ...”

“... like to admit it, by The Way Things Go (1987), a 30-minute film by the artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss. Their creation is an example of a Rube Goldberg machine (named after the cartoonist) in which an unlikely number of devices are linked together to create a domino effect – in its original sense the name refers to a machine designed to perform a ...”

“... had started receiving letters from witnesses after writing about UFOs for the Village Voice, and David Jacobs, a historian at Temple University who had written the first academic monograph on the subject. Believing that abductions were now at epidemic level, part of a sinister intergalactic breeding programme, Hopkins and Jacobs treated their subjects as ...”

“... As I write this, the Liberal MP David Alton is about to introduce a Bill changing the upper time limit on legal abortions from 28 weeks to 18. If he succeeds, more women will be forced to give birth against their will, and more will be obliged to give birth to children already known to be severely handicapped. Whether he succeeds will be determined by a House of Commons where 13 out of every 16 MPs belong to the sex that does not get pregnant and does not, traditionally, take on the main responsibility of childcare ...”

“... to be processed”. I call those who accept this view of man and nature Turing’s men.’ David Bolter is a Classical scholar although he has a degree in computer science. He writes engagingly, encompassing the sweep of history right back to the Greeks. Computer technology is a curious combination of ancient and Western European technical ...”

“... to illustrate various aspects of working-class life in Useful Toil and Destiny Obscure. By 1981, David Vincent had found 142 memoirs spanning the years from 1790 to 1850, and in Bread, Knowledge and Freedom used them to explore the response of ordinary people to economic and social change. In 1989, Vincent, Burnett and ...”

“... from recent prods to produce work of greater scope. In The History Manifesto (2014), Jo Guldi and David Armitage worry that the production of scholarly miniatures disqualifies historians from contributing to urgent cultural and political discussions – about climate change, sustainable production, international governance etc – in which the longue durée ...”

“... about raves that had to be stopped? Breaking into warehouses was illegal, but there were already laws for that. Ecstasy had been banned in the UK since 1977. And it couldn’t simply have been the power of the sound systems or the youth of the partygoers. Less than a month after Castlemorton, a huge licensed event called Fantazia was celebrated in the Daily ...”

“... and its eclectic membership included the philosopher Bernard Williams, the sports commentator David Coleman and the agony aunt Marje Proops. The report they produced two years later was measured, intelligent, elegantly written, slightly agonised and almost wholly ineffectual. The Rothschild Commission accepted that the law on gambling in Britain remained ...”

“... The moment was late in 1970, at the Travellers’ Club in London, during a supper for 14 people. David Brower, the saint of eco-sanity from the Sierra Club in California, had just given a sermon, a hell-fire variant of the one geologists have used for a century or more: rocks are long, life is short, who do we think we are? Brower’s homily – which the ...”

“... and similar clean-up operations. And then, all of a sudden, the whole thing fell apart. New state laws against secret societies, together with one or two well-publicised cases of corruption, seemed to be the cause. Really, though, by 1930 Americans had grown tired of being clean. By this date, they were also broke. Being clean and broke was pretty ...”

“... and family life, on which the settlement’s ‘blueprint for growth’ was premised. By contrast, David Neal’s monograph opens with a successful legal action brought by a convict couple against one of the First Fleet captains. Neal is concerned to show how the establishment of the rule of law in a penal colony, at once a tautology and an oxymoron, created ...”

“... had no sympathy for Marx’s conviction that violent conflict was the inevitable expression of the laws of history. In an essay called ‘Isaiah’s Marx, and Mine’ that begins with engaging personal reminiscence and goes on to careful exegetical argument, G.A. Cohen recounts his experience as a student of Berlin’s, and then takes issue with his view of ...”

“... Paul Coltman, Richard Dankleff, Robin Ivy, Pete Morgan (two), Phyllis Koestenbaum, Barbara Moore, David MacSweeney (one out of two), Randall Garrison, Donald Stallybrass, Ellery Akers, Peter Abbs, John Hodgen, Andrew Motion, Edwin Drummond, Gregory Harrison, Gordon Mason and Robert Ballard, Isabel Nathaniel and Peter Didsbury, Anthony Edkins and Brian ...”

“... with the Duke when he was Prince. The authors seem indifferent to the perils of the libel laws and in consequence write with refreshing if unchivalrous candour, but unfortunately with much literary ignorance. They confuse two very different masters – Lewis Carroll with Edward Lear – and ascribe that ridiculous but famous play What Every Woman ...”