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“... against serious ill-treatment has not inhibited the brutal anti-immigrant and anti-asylum laws of recent years, but it has given some protection to the persecuted, the impoverished and the tortured, who would otherwise have been removed from this country without even a chance to associate their plight with any kind of legal argument. In 2002, the ...”

“... to marry them. In Lichfield, the geographical centre of Middle England, a statue of Captain Edward John Smith of the Titanic stands in a park bestowing dangerous blessings on newly-wed couples emerging from the nearby register office. In McKie’s version of England the past is generally not allowed to assert itself as a moral yardstick, a measure of decline ...”

“... on this occasion were the rioters themselves, killed by troops, or by gentleman volunteers like John Wilkes, or by the raw alcohol they looted from Catholic-owned distilleries. Food rioters, too, only rarely inflicted serious injury on the farmers, shopkeepers and middlemen whose prices they protested against. And industrial rioters were far more likely to ...”

“... be given from outside, determined by the way things actually are in the world, or by the generic laws of vraisemblance. It would, I think, have been good if The Siren’s Song had included more of what Blanchot wrote about fiction in the late Forties and Fifties. The great question to which he addressed himself was the one to which other like-minded ...”

“... semiology (from the Greek semeion, ‘sign’). It would investigate the nature of signs and the laws governing them. Since it does not yet exist, one cannot say for certain that it will exist. But it has a right to exist, a place ready for it in advance. Three-quarters of a century later, semiology, the study of signs, exists, but tenuously, if the test of ...”

“... they need to ‘avoid the electric fence’, sources of guaranteed trouble such as the libel laws and the Israel lobby; to be based on ‘safe ideas’ and contradict no loved prevailing wisdoms; to avoid complicated or context-rich problems; and always to ‘give both sides of the story’ (‘balance means never having to say you’re sorry – because ...”

“... whether a lack of proportion has been shown by our representatives in Parliament. Should we alter laws on a wave of public emotion? Should the Government use a half-completed murder enquiry as justification for the implementation of repressive legislation? The proximity of Damilola Taylor’s death to the Queen’s Speech has made it possible for overtly ...”

“... John Robert Seeley was Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge between Kingsley and Acton. One of the few eminent Victorians who inspired no memorial biography, he was best remembered as the author of The Expansion of England (1883), a sweeping historical manifesto in favour of the unification of the British Empire ...”

“... Volvo trucks while intoning ‘a body crafted to perfection, a pair of legs engineered to defy the laws of physics, a mind set to master the most epic of spaces’. Mostly, however, what characterises this version of manhood is that it is completely incapable of parodying, or even seeing, itself. It was the genius of the women who played the parts of men at ...”

“... God, not another fucking elf!’ the English lecturer and long-time Inkling Hugo Dyson cried. John Wain, an attendee at meetings in the late 1940s, described his heart sinking as Tolkien appeared at Lewis’s door with a bulging jacket pocket, yet again. Tolkien looked down on Lewis’s Narnia, which he thought had been created with insufficient ...”

“... that gave an illusion of argument rather than the substance. The region also preserved some local laws, not least to do with hunting, which were at odds with France’s national legal code, and all the more fiercely protected for that. More controversial was the war cemetery with its rows of white and black crosses: white for those who had died fighting for ...”

“... When John Wesley visited Bath in 1739 to inveigh against the follies that flourished at hot springs, he was challenged by a fleshy, domineering figure in a white beaver hat, who demanded to know by what authority he was preaching. Wesley’s retort (or so he claimed) was ‘Pray, sir, are you a justice of the peace, or the mayor of this city? By what authority do you ask me these things?’ Richard (‘Beau’) Nash was at a loss for a ready reply ...”

“... enacted into law by parliament.’ He offers a list: Cobbett’s proposals about factory laws, labour unions, laws relating to the press, military discipline, poor laws, universal suffrage ... (We are reminded of Cobbett’s list of good things done by Bonaparte.) Every socialist ...”

“... best-selling writers, their business is not in the main literary, and in 1972 the prizewinner, John Berger, made a speech in which he expressly deplored what he regarded as the exploitative nature of the donor’s principal interest; indeed he gave half his prize to a revolutionary movement. Other writers have shown some embarrassment but have not, so far ...”

“... part of the Northwest Passage, the so-called ‘Arctic Grail’. From Martin Frobisher in 1576 to John Franklin in 1845, generations of European explorers searched for a navigable route through the Arctic islands to Asia. Many of them – including Franklin and his men – died in the attempt. Their greatest challenge was sea-ice, which has almost always ...”