“... 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 ...”

“... Tristram Shandy, himself opening his remarks on that novel with a very apt citation from Plato’s Laws, to the effect that people should be sure not to be drunk or disordered when copulating, lest their offspring be physically or mentally impaired: for ‘the beginning, like a god,’ says Plato, ‘preserves all.’ Sterne’s is described as ‘the most ...”

“... million came in only last Friday!’ Easy come, easy go. When the boss of the central bank, David Oddsson, and the finance minister, Arni Mathiesen, declared after nationalising Icesave that Iceland would not pay these debts – or, in Mathiesen’s version, might perhaps settle some part of them – the UK applied its anti-terrorist ...”

“... on the maintenance of hair, the proper pricing for Caesarean births and pamphlets of sumptuary laws. There are notices limiting the profits of pharmacists and others setting the price of satsumas. A document from Raqqa obtained and translated by Tamimi details driving regulations: ‘It is absolutely forbidden for cars to go about without a comprehensive ...”

“... role in government than its namesake in the UK. Unlike its British equivalent, it can strike down laws it finds unconstitutional. Events in America’s recent history have magnified the court’s profile; its partisan contortions in favour of George W. Bush in the case of Bush v. Gore decided the 2000 presidential election. But nothing has done more to push ...”

“... to ‘scrap the Human Rights Act, and introduce a British Bill of Rights’, but that was in David Cameron’s 2015 manifesto. Johnson’s manifesto promised only to ‘update the Human Rights Act’ – hence the IHRAR – not repeal it.The consultation document gives very little away about what a new bill of rights might look like. How closely it might ...”

“... boards of the banks that they were appointed to regulate, and senior civil servants interpreted laws and regulations so as to further the personal interests of senior politicians and their cronies. There have been several international initiatives aimed at tackling financial irregularity since the late 1990s, but the offshore economy has scarcely changed ...”

“... the punishment for high treason was to be hanged, drawn and quartered. While other treason laws had come and gone, the 1351 statute remained the sole law defining high treason in England, and since the Act of Union it had also been the law in Scotland. The statute was generally agreed to be ‘declaratory’: that is to say, it was intended not to ...”

“... read what he writes and not think of similarities between then and now. His book is in contrast to David Kynaston’s four-volume history of the City of London, which takes up the idea of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ and portrays the Victorian era as a relatively sane and sober interlude.* Kynaston explains the hands-off policy in terms of esprit de corps. The ...”

“... the consolations of an essential self. There never was such a thing, for Barthes any more than for David Hume, and we are doubtless all the better for it. What looks like a loss is actually a liberation. Unity is an illusion, and consistency is more a vice than a virtue. Postmodernism is full of personality cults, but they know themselves to be ...”

“... is reduced to the faint and tinny sound from another person’s AirPods. In its place: hospitals, laws, health insurance bills, human resources departments, the anxious search for a place to stay, the friends who don’t want to know, the brute force of the state, the defiance of the body.The narrator and her husband have no children. The thought of having a ...”

“... neo-conservative of the 1980s, but his successors may well go far beyond him, striking down laws protecting workers and the environment, supporting the destruction of basic civil liberties in the war on terrorism, and engaging in a wholesale attack on the premises of 20th-century constitutionalism. Or then again, Bush may hesitate. Despite his professed ...”

“... all that has been good and all that has been bad about modern politics. Governance means rules, laws, codes, audits, accountability, efficiency, regularity, on the one hand, and people, on the other. It is clear how all of the former might benefit the latter. But it is not clear how people are to find the political identity on which states depend in the ...”

“... ideas. Montesquieu’s dithyrambic praise of the English constitution in The Spirit of the Laws, like Diderot’s for Samuel Richardson (‘O Richardson, Richardson ... I will keep you on the same shelf with Moses, Homer, Euripides and Sophocles’) caused French hearts to beat even faster. A steady supply of political pilgrims made their way across ...”

“... Costello, J.M. Coetzee’s latest novel, where the protagonist proposes that there are no laws for the prisoner of war who ‘does not belong to our tribe. We can do what we want with him … cut his throat, tear out his heart, throw him on the fire’? Several of those reporting in these books affirm that there is no single cause to which the Abu ...”