“... his words’. Dr Johnson, an expert fault-finder, found many faults, without doubting the poet’s powers. Indeed the necessary warnings were first expressed by Shakespeare’s friend and rival Ben Jonson, who loved the man ‘this side idolatry’ – certainly he ‘wanted art’, certainly he could be hasty and careless, but could still be said to be ‘not ...”

“... hostility to eloquence and represented it as compatible with the exercise of reason. Richard Tuck’s essay, on Hobbes’s religion, also brings out differences between Leviathan and the earlier works, which had been less theologically unorthodox and less profoundly anti-clerical. Nearly a quarter of a century has passed since Pocock urged that ...”

“... crimes of the British long after the empire has been abandoned. The latest to join the list are Richard Gott and Partha Chatterjee. Gott, who describes himself as ‘a historian in private practice’, has written a wide-ranging study of resistance to British rule in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, North America and the Antipodes. Some of the longest chapters ...”

“... Johnson visited Pembroke College, Oxford and called on the master, William Adams. According to Richard Sher, Boswell wrote in his journal how dismayed he had been to see in the master’s library a copy of the quarto edition of David Hume’s Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects of 1758, handsomely bound in morocco leather. Boswell believed, Sher ...”

“... is a branch of psychopathology at least as plausible as Adam Smith’s faith in the harmonising powers of the Invisible Hand. The most crucial (and piquant) irony of the debt crisis is that it arrived just as the Invisible Hand was making its biggest comeback in fifty years. In this age of Reaganomics and Thatcherism, when the ‘new realism’ of the ...”

“... trials, the law officers claimed that the LCS was leading a plot to depose the King and usurp the powers of government, but the juries rejected this claim each time it was put before them, no doubt because it relied on arguments about what would count as usurpation and deposition which were figurative and technical to the point of absurdity. On at least two ...”

“... embarrassed to turn himself into ‘one of the leading literary entrepreneurs of his day’. The powers that be had not rewarded his talents, so let fashion and the literary marketplace do so. His father’s adult life, too, had been a hunt for preferment. Roger Sterne, an army ensign, failed to achieve promotion until a few months before his death. After ...”

“... the effect of pragmatism is to politicise philosophy – to switch our attention from ‘the powers of the human mind’ to the socio-cultural conditions of human inquiry. It tells us that there are no objects of loyalty or sources of comfort other than actual and possible human communities: that there is nothing like Truth or Reason or The ...”

“... fiction. What she dreamed of escaping to is hard to say. One of the problems faced by Richard Mabey in his biography of Thompson, Dreams of the Good Life, is that Lark Rise to Candleford and its sequel, Heatherley, which wasn’t published until 1979, are almost the only sources we have. By the time she came to write them, the intervening years ...”

“... turns out to be what Montesquieu had supposed, but few English have believed – the separation of powers peculiar to our kingdom. Colported home by Leo Amery, the judgment of De l’esprit de lois re-emerges as the deeper truth of our institutions after all, whatever historians may say. This departure from the verdict of modern scholarship is ...”

“... Europe, as it had done after the First World War, a ‘spheres of influence’ deal between great powers, on the lines informally agreed by Churchill and Stalin at Moscow in 1944, might have worked. But an impoverished Britain was no longer in any shape to play the great power in Europe, and the US, fired up with liberal internationalism, was congenitally ...”

“... the histories of colonial wars’: it tells ‘us more about the relations between the imperial powers than about the “third world” of the mental patients themselves’. For this reason, among many others, Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady is to be welcomed, for its primary focus is upon this neglected group – for the most part, on female ...”

“... so archaic, so self-confounding, so remote from the basic American consensus, ever got so far?’ Richard Hofstadter asked. Graffiti artists shared the intelligentsia’s disdain and defaced Goldwater’s campaign billboards, appending the word ‘Wing’ to his slogan ‘In Your Heart You Know He’s Right.’ Others added the coda: ‘In Your Guts You Know ...”

“... with the input of information required for at least some of the output. It’s obvious that his powers of assimilation are, by the standards of normal or normally lazy writers, exceptional. Nor does he squander the knowledge thus acquired: it goes into a TV series and a novel or a critical biography. One’s admiration for all this prudent industry may ...”

“... a long history in political thought, not least in relation to the expansion of European imperial powers. But it was in Spanish America that its modern form – applied to non-imperial or non-colonial nation states – was first put into effective use as a diplomatic norm. 3. By the late 1820s, all of Spain’s former colonies in the Americas, apart from Cuba ...”