“... a thousand pages Johnson’s book is longer than Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 1988 (subtitle, ‘Economic Change and Military Conflict, 1500-2000’), or Simon Schama’s Citizens, 1989. At first glance it looks as if the reader gets a smaller return, a mere 15 years of history at a point when, on the face of it, nothing dramatic ...”

“... or to devise a perfect forward line for France, or to imagine discussing such matters with, say, Kevin Keegan. You may not have allowed the bleached Romanians to get to you, but surely no one can deny that throughout this 1998 World Cup there was an altogether unsettling preoccupation with hairstyle. Maybe it was all to do with the world’s supposedly best ...”

“... and commented on in another admirable analysis which appeared just before the Framework Document, Kevin Boyle and Tom Hadden’s Northern Ireland: The Choice. The authors point out that any new agreement on governing Northern Ireland hinges on a choice between fully acknowledging this existing separation or trying to wish it away by administrative ...”

“... minted liberal constitutions. If the constitution already gives the sovereign plenipotentiary powers there is no need to suspend it, and over time officially declared states of emergency may become less common as governments absorb their emergency powers within the constitutional order. Agamben refers to this process as ...”

“... to the subsequent history of Ulster. Protestant hegemony was established by law (the Special Powers Act, 1922), force (mainly the B-Specials, resident in each locality) and the gerrymandering (here always ‘alleged’) of local government boundaries. But because Johnson conceives of developments in Northern Ireland in terms of an all-Irish history, he ...”

“... greater than it is thought to have been. This undoubtedly contains some truth, since Continental powers never knew for certain that Charles would not risk war. Yet this is a limited truth, and it should not be pushed too far. The Personal Rule of Charles I could have been written as a political narrative, which is still much needed for the 1630s, or as a ...”

“... withdrawal, from the life of the Republic, from its machinery.’ Another, sillier example is Kevin Costner’s dire and bloated vanity movie The Postman. Over the course of three hours of hallucinatory badness, Costner’s Shakespeare-spouting drifter reunites the scattered communities of post-apocalypse America by convincing them that the national ...”

“... them with Russia or China, neo-sovereigntists believe that it is by pushing out the old colonial powers, starting with France, that Africa will complete its emancipation.’ Mbembe concludes that African countries now face a zero-sum choice: neo-sovereigntism or democracy. For a philosopher and public intellectual so intent on deconstructing binaries, this ...”

“... account for less than half the text. The remainder is dedicated to listing increased police powers, including legislation to remove criminal defendants’ right to silence, expanded provision for the retention of DNA and CCTV evidence, and the creation of new powers to stop and search people without suspicion of a ...”

“... Middle England by a Home Secretary who does not accept the need to preserve a balance between the powers of the state and the rights of defendants. It signals that those accused of crime do not deserve our protection. The Bill is 374 pages long and its stated aim is ‘the rebalancing of the criminal justice system in favour of victims, witnesses and ...”

“... father Walter in the autobiographical volumes A Cab at the Door and Midnight Oil shows his powers at full stretch. Walter Pritchett, as seen by his eldest son, was a figure of Micawberian optimism, opening a newsagent and stationer’s shop in the Ipswich area at the age of 22 without knowing the trade or having any capital, and to his astonishment ...”

“... the US were handing out pamphlets on ‘How to speak up about gender identity’. Its president, Kevin Roberts, would later decry ‘the woke industrial complex’ in a speech about the death of ‘global Europe’. On the opposite side of the hall, a man from the Danube Institute gave me back copies of the Hungarian Conservative. He had come straight from a ...”

“... Marlowe, in his stale office in Downtown, snarling alternately at the punk scum and the powers-that-be, was a political time-bomb waiting to explode. In their agony and panic no less than 100,000 bedrock Republicans crossed the lines in 1934 to vote for the socialist Upton Sinclair in his gubernatorial campaign conducted under the slogan ‘End ...”

“... for progressive devolution, it does not break entirely new ground: the concept of ‘reserved powers’ goes back to Gladstone’s Home Rule Bills, and a multi-stage process was built into the 1920 Government of Ireland Act with its provision for a Council of Ireland. The mechanics of the new proposals, however, are more sophisticated, and allow workable ...”

“... a human creation and therefore susceptible to historical and social change. As scholars such as Kevin Anderson and Marcello Musto have observed, in his later years Marx came to appreciate the diversity of human cultures and economic practices around the world, and whatever commitment he had to discovering necessary or universal laws in the economic sphere ...”