“... that obedience to natural law means ‘that every man shall pursue his own happiness’ (echo of David Hume and foretaste of Bentham himself?). The puzzle is rather, as Ross Harrison suggests in his discussion of Bentham’s thought as a whole – a considerable achievement – why Bentham did not enlist natural law as an ally of utility: they had much in ...”

“... Arafat, however, even ‘the voters’ do not seem too enchanted. Buying a paper in Jerusalem, David Wolton said, ‘Look there’s Arafat kissing Haider Abdel Shafi,’ the eminently respected leader of the Madrid delegation whom Arafat had insulted the day before. ‘Arafat,’ said the paper-seller, ‘Arafat kisses everybody. He kisses ...”

“... she was to become famous, but because Denis’s support was irreplaceable. He willingly played a vital role in the progressive elevation of his remarkable wife, in whom his own faith proved unshakeable. This much is handsomely made clear in The Path to Power. What Thatcher fails to say, however, is that Denis’s money was crucial. True, there is a ...”

“... the people versus la casta. From the outset, Iglesias and his comrades understood that it was vital to know how to operate on hostile media and political terrain. They had to be realistic about the hegemonic strength of Spanish neoliberalism and the gap between what was being said in the streets and squares about the struggles of everyday life and what ...”

“... of little but worrying about not being taken seriously. Making much of little is, of course, a vital task and one at which jokes excel (though they’re just as good at making little of much). But I can’t think of any Jewish shoe jokes, so perhaps the contributors to this collection of essays had their hands tied. Cultural studies usually makes much of ...”

“... a bit weary of the repeated mantra ‘like Nedham’ or ‘like Milton’ (phrases that blur the vital distinction between a shared vocabulary and a shared mentality), Worden often recreates with real force the charge attached to particular words and phrases in the 1650s and after. Samson Agonistes is made to sound stronger and angrier by being seen as a ...”

“... Mosul, Picot was unaware that Kitchener and Sykes were secretly planning to give it to him,’ David Fromkin wrote in A Peace to End All Peace (1989). ‘They wanted the French sphere of influence to be extended from the Mediterranean coast on the west all the way to the east so that it paralleled and adjoined Russian-held zones; the French zone was to ...”

“... had difficulty setting aside a century’s propaganda to the effect that the Ottoman Empire was a vital British interest – that the Turk, in other words, must stay. Until the Great War, Johnny Turk was a plucky fellow who maintained order between the Suez Canal and India. If he chopped off a head or a hand from time to time, it was to keep the tribes in ...”

“... a shortcoming emphasised by Girvin. Exasperated, the US representative in Dublin, David Gray, complained that ‘this running a government on hatred for another country is a very dangerous thing and is bound to land him [de Valera] on the scrap heap eventually.’ He couldn’t have been more wrong. ‘Emergency’ was also a technical ...”

“... Arthur; we must reject him from our histories and, above all, from the titles of our books,’ David Dumville wrote in 1977; and he was backed up by, for instance, J.N.L. Myres in 1986: ‘No figure on the borderline of history and mythology has wasted more of the historian’s time.’ In his new book, Nicholas Higham cites neither opinion but certainly ...”

“... of post-Rylean anti-Cartesians in chronological order – Wilfrid Sellars, J.J.C. Smart, David Armstrong, Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, Donald Davidson, Ruth Millikan, Patricia and Paul Churchland – one gets a clear sense of a developing consensus. There is increasing agreement about which moves will and won’t work, which strategies are dead and ...”

“... the artist,’ D.H. Lawrence wrote, ‘trust the tale.’ It must be his most famous aphorism – David Lodge even called it ‘a cardinal principle of modern hermeneutics’. It has proved especially popular with critics who want to deny authors the last word on their work. ‘What if a reader construes a poem in a way you felt you didn’t mean?’ an ...”

“... David Blunkett’s latest Criminal Justice Bill, this Government’s 12th piece of such legislation since coming to power in 1997, will go a long way to producing a caste of untouchables in this country: those accused of committing a crime. It will strip away safeguards that have taken centuries to accrue, and alienate criminal suspects further from society as a whole ...”

“... not quite know what to do with them. The illustration on the front cover is by a Scottish artist, David Wilkie. John Rennie makes an appearance as one of ‘the most iconic figures of the age’. Thomas Chalmers features as the ‘spiritual guide’ of the Liberal Tories. Adam Smith, of course, is ‘central’. Mechanics institutes open first in Glasgow, and ...”

“... resemblance, Finkelstein and McCleery call their anthology of ‘book history studies’ ‘a vital resource for all those studying cultural studies, library studies, and book publishing studies’. This is a book in which suffixes dangle as precariously as modifiers. The symbiosis of ‘studies’ with Readers should provide a thesis topic for some ...”