“... podcasters and the dukes are more likely to be tech titans. Unaccountable power still needs to be held to account, which means it needs to be scored, which means the scoring system will be subject to capture by people trying to exercise unaccountable power. That’s the dialectic we are dealing with, as we always have been. Because Nguyen is so keen to sort ...”

“... One of the principal problems of the warring generals was an inability to agree on strategy. At David Owen’s insistence, the Alliance’s election objectives were limited to achieving the balance of power. This had the apparent advantage of modest realism, but there were more substantial disadvantages. The first of these – as I can report by taking a ...”

“... where an interference is permitted by law and is proportionate. In 2002 the Strasbourg court held in Diane Pretty’s case that the crime of assisting suicide was a proportionate limit on the right to die, since it protected ‘the weak and vulnerable and especially those who are not in a position to take informed decisions’. This again left out the ...”

“... as it did recently on the Hillsborough disaster. Of that case Lord Judge, then lord chief justice, held that ‘it seems to us elementary that the emergence of fresh evidence which may reasonably lead to the conclusion that the substantial truth about how an individual met his death was not revealed at the first inquest, will normally make it both desirable ...”

“... politics that it can be hard to take it seriously. Indeed, taking it seriously is sometimes held to be a sign of political immaturity, or worse still, just more hypocrisy. We know that politicians can’t possibly sustain all the absurd contortions we demand of them as the price for securing our votes. In such circumstances, to insist that democratic ...”

“... campaign, in Sicily and then in Italy – Monty was nominally subordinate to Alexander. He held Alexander’s ability in low esteem, and Hamilton’s passages about Monty and Alexander are as explicit and persuasive as anything here. He quotes Monty in Italy: ‘Alexander is a very great friend of mine, and I am very fond of him. But I am under no ...”

“... the inaugural Wilding Festival at St George’s Bloomsbury, where Davison’s memorial service was held.1 Emily Wilding Davison was born in 1872 in a substantial house in Greenwich, the middle daughter of her speculator father’s second marriage. She was red-haired and liked sweets; her pet name at home was Weet Weet. At the age of 19 she won a scholarship ...”

“... to bring back Israel’s three captured soldiers (believing, mistakenly, that all of them are held by Hizbullah – an error that shows how sketchy his knowledge of Israeli affairs is). But it was what he said about Jerusalem that was scandalous. No Palestinian, no Arab, no Muslim will make peace with Israel if the Haram-al-Sharif compound (also known as ...”

“... end pick up the pieces. And it will. Downing Street’s first-choice strategy for the outing of David Kelly – writing, semi-publicly, to the Intelligence and Security Committee to offer him as a witness – was vetoed by Ann Taylor MP, the Committee’s chairman, whose staff refused to be sent the suggested letter. In her testimony to the Inquiry, Taylor ...”

“... Opposed to them were the Jansenists (after a 17th-century Flemish bishop, Cornelius Jansen), who held that a radically sinful humanity could hope for salvation only if God chose to bestow his ‘efficacious grace’ on them. Unlike Protestants, to whose beliefs on the subject of grace they strayed perilously close, the Jansenists had no desire to break with ...”

“... and other forms of topographical literature. The reproductive print trade in its various branches held out the promise of considerable financial rewards, particularly for specialists able to churn out masses of acceptably finished views in a short space of time, but this kind of hack-work could hardly claim the status of a liberal or dignified art. In this ...”

“... to own them. Most country boys who moved to the cities in mid-19th-century England must never have held a gun in their hands. So disarmament may in part have been a consequence of the Game Laws. In Norfolk and Suffolk in 1970 there was one shotgun certificate for every eight households. Had the countryside been reamed since the Game Laws were reformed in ...”

“... books, an old-fashioned resource. It is one of the ironies of literary history that a book widely held to be a danger to young people when it was first published is itself an inquiry into the effects of compulsive reading. Here is a passage from Werther’s first letter, reflecting his enthusiasm for a place new to him on an early summer’s day: Solitude in ...”

“... the corridor of Thornfield Hall in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), where Bertha Mason is held captive behind a small black door. More frightening, I’d say, because a lot cannier, is the one on the upper floor of a village inn in Mary E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). The scheming protagonist ventures along it in search of the room ...”

“... will allow, by the genius loci of the islands:     Perennial emblem painted on the shield Held up to cow a never-conquered land Fast in the little General’s fragile hand. The method of Marshall’s book – to deal in turn with the facts of Orkney life, the island, the farm, the estate, the church, the school, and relate them where possible to the ...”