“... of 1665, Sabbatai was declaring that, as the messiah, he was no longer bound by Jewish ritual and laws; he changed a fast day into a feast on the grounds that although it commemorated the fall of the First and Second Temple, it was also his own birthday. He started eating forbidden food in public and giving women a leading role in religious services. Over the ...”

“... rarely floated nationalist solutions to their problems. The slogan ‘English votes for English laws’ strikes a discordant note in the dominant melody of English history. It’s not that the English have been immune to chauvinism or national mythologising. Since the later Middle Ages at least – and arguably for much longer – they have enjoyed a strong ...”

“... These biographies of John Gielgud by Jonathan Croall and Sheridan Morley are quite hard to tell apart. They are of much the same size, bear handsome pictures of the actor in old age on the front of their dust-jackets, and are, inevitably, affectionate and indulgent towards their subject. As Dirk Bogarde remarked when Croall consulted him about the work in hand, ‘everybody adored him, so the book might make rather flat reading ...”

“... how Gorbachev reintroduced a series of reforms in the latter half of the Eighties, known as the Laws of Enterprises and Cooperatives, which gave managers the right to make ‘independent’ decisions, so long as they conformed to the plan, and small co-operatives the right to engage in petty business ventures that posed no challenge to state ...”

“... then as now, were bursting at the seams with prisoners scooped up by the mindless severity of the laws protecting property. There being no provision for life imprisonment for those reprieved from the hangman, transportation to the other side of the planet was devised. The other explanation for the expedition (which Keneally seems to favour) suggests that the ...”

“... is proceeding on overwhelmingly creative and, on balance, encouraging lines. Change is the law of laws and has been from the start (supposing there needed to be one), change not in the slow realisation of some preordained plan – Bergson is not a finalist – but as a transcendent, suprarational force whose effects are to be observed in ‘the continuous ...”

“... market liberalism advocated in The Orange Book (2004), a collection of essays coedited by David Laws that included contributions by Chris Huhne, Vince Cable and Clegg himself. The aim of the contributors was to reaffirm a version of liberalism they believed had been lost: one in which support for small government and the free market goes with a strong ...”

“... sister Joanna (or Martha – the name is in doubt) were the youngest of ten daughters of the late John Taaffe of Smarmore Castle, Co. Louth. At the ages of 26 and 30 respectively, they have been despatched to Rome by the current head of the family, their half-brother, another John Taaffe, to visit a distant kinsman, Lord ...”

“... of the scholarly pretences of his fellow economists and of all manner of other balderdash, John Kenneth Galbraith’s only reticence hides a skilfully disguised but intense puritanism. He may not suffer the classic puritan’s agonies at the thought that somebody, somewhere is having a good time, but if contentment is a goal for the rest of us, it is ...”

“... of all religious groups which accept that their role is to persuade their members to obey the laws of the state. Spinoza’s Tractatus-Theologico Politicus, which most likely grew out of his unpublished answer to the Synagogue, starts by arguing that there is no special religious knowledge, neither by prophecy nor miracles. The purported Providential ...”

“... amendments guaranteed the end of slavery, Black citizenship, the equal protection of the laws regardless of race and, for Black men, the right to vote. Each amendment ended with a clause empowering the federal government to enforce its provisions – a promise (or threat) of future national action. Unfortunately, as Sidney Andrews, a Northern ...”

“... about raves that had to be stopped? Breaking into warehouses was illegal, but there were already laws for that. Ecstasy had been banned in the UK since 1977. And it couldn’t simply have been the power of the sound systems or the youth of the partygoers. Less than a month after Castlemorton, a huge licensed event called Fantazia was celebrated in the Daily ...”

“... elsewhere on the island, or even as lieutenant to a completely different pirate ‘king’ called John Plantain. It’s a confusing picture. ‘What,’ Graeber asks, ‘is one to make of all this?’In Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia he tries to answer this question. As the title suggests, for Graeber there is more at stake here than one would ...”

“... a ‘hedge school’ run by a Mr O’Halloran, who taught his classes outside in deference to laws prohibiting Catholic education. Yet in 1761, as a junior employee of Lord Halifax, the new viceroy of Ireland, Burke found himself, in Grant’s words, ‘a cog … in the British machinery of Catholic suppression’. In his 1777 letter to Fox, Burke ...”

“... but resides more in widely-held false notions of genetic determinism, and ‘universal laws’ that supposedly govern the biological processes of development, behaviour and evolution, than in any overt political agenda. Teasing out the essence of what it means to grow – irrationally, unpredictably and uncertainly – into an approximation of an ...”