“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... region, places a ceiling on private ambition and imposes informal equivalents of sumptuary laws to control conspicuous spending. If Greens succeeded in stopping the pressure that sucks individual talent out of local communities, trains it for action on distant stages, and generates all those needs for transport and commodities, they certainly might ...”

“... younger half-brother from his father’s third marriage.Æthelstan’s​ reign is the focus of David Woodman’s excellent new monograph, The First King of England, which posits this period as the crux of England’s formation. Æthelstan’s reign was particularly significant for his takeover of Northumbria. As Stenton noted, this was the first time ‘a ...”

“... the service in English, allowing men and women to sit together in synagogue and observing dietary laws and Sabbath rules more flexibly. The traditional community is still too ready to kiss off progressive opinion and disregard what is seen as a slimline faith. The Jewish Chronicle carried a fair-sized piece about the rally at the Theatre Royal; the article ...”

“... Fox, while lesser opposition members, on the balcony of Brooks’s club, hold up a ‘New Code of Laws’ over a tray of severed heads with the caption ‘Killed off for the Public Good’. Meanwhile, across the street, outside the Tory White’s club, two gentlemen have been hanged from a lamp-post by the English armée du people, and one of them is ...”

“... Hendrix noted in his diary after their first, brief meeting. ‘She just knocked me on my ass,’ David Crosby said after hearing her sing ‘Both Sides, Now’. ‘It was the highest quality of songwriting. I liked her better than Dylan.’ Crosby briefly became Mitchell’s inamorato and produced her first album. Leonard Cohen, another influential early ...”

“... activity; and his most recent full-length opera, Gawain, has an ambitious verse libretto by David Harsent. Ted Hughes once wrote a libretto for Gordon Crosse. The Story of Vasco, whose subject-matter involves crows, is an interesting opera by a composer who has now, regrettably, stopped composing. The poet John Birtwhistle supplied ...”

“... Party had kept secret during its uninterrupted period in power from 1948. The Labour patriarch David Ben-Gurion had called Begin a ‘Jewish Hitler’. Begin, a zealot but a legalist, had called Ben-Gurion’s extension of the repressive British Defence Regulations, although enforced mainly against Israel’s Arabs, ‘Nazi ...”

“... act. They worked up a routine, tweaked it for success and, like all entrepreneurs, followed the laws of profit and repeated it. Television changed show business. Instead of the performer pursuing an audience, the audience now came to the performer. Television networks existed to sell that audience to advertisers. Caesar was the first star spawned by ...”

“... she took her son, Ramón, to Paris. She hadn’t troubled to ingratiate herself with her in-laws, and they had excluded her from the inheritance. She wrote a book on the history of French hairstyles and a guide on how to live frugally, recommending stews over roasts at dinner parties, for instance, since your guests will mop up the sauce with bread and ...”

“... a failure of statecraft on a scale unmatched since Lord North lost the American colonies, David Cameron has managed to convert a problem of party management into a constitutional crisis. The result of the EU referendum raises serious constitutional issues which haven’t been properly confronted. The media are now comfortably immersed in the political ...”

“... well as his view of laughter as an aid to sociability; so too did Hutcheson’s pupil Adam Smith. David Hume often resorted to ridicule to undermine hypocrisy or superstition, even if he doubted its capacity to settle controversial questions, arguing that mockery was as likely to distort as to reveal the truth. Some of Hume’s philosophical adversaries, such ...”

“... see, of our plans for the evening and the rest of the season. And of the impending publication of David Gower’s autobiography.* This had been ghosted by Martin Johnson, a man who, since he began following Leicestershire for the Leicester Mercury back in 1973, two years before Gower’s first-class career began there, had known him better than most. The ...”