“... 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 ...”

“... his personal jeweller for two hundred wrist watches that flashed both cross of Jesus and star of David. Such personal touches were far more Elvis than any of the books that had been recommended to him. Soon life would again be games with lascivious starlets and golden guns and awesome dune buggies. Soon he would be home again and primed for every day’s ...”

“... any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. The policies that are vital and necessary for America are no longer subjects of significant disagreement, but are disputable only in detail, procedure, priority or method.Quigley was alluding principally to the durable consensus on grand strategy, military alliance and trade, but his ...”

“... flourishes, and its crowning glories are the five volumes of the Poems edited by Paul Hammond and David Hopkins and published by Longman between 1995 and 2005. But the pleasures of scholarship are not wholly coextensive with those of reading. Students are probably still encouraged to enjoy the measured venom of the satires. But where to go beyond that? Paul ...”

“... in his research to satisfy that insatiable perfectionist Alma Mahler. Werfel’s novel provides a vital clue to the reason there was such especial vehemence against the Armenians. Its wealthy hero, Gabriel Bragadian, has returned from Paris to his native village of Yoghonoluk and slides into his dead father’s role as informal leader of his own and the ...”

“... of Racial Capitalism in South Africa’, by the South African historians Martin Legassick and David Hemson. In the late 1970s, the official position of the UN’s International Labour Organisation was that the policy of apartheid was in direct conflict with economic growth, and that growth would eventually undermine and force an end to ...”

“... involvement in Britain’s 5G network, and the bombardiers of Brexit – Iain Duncan Smith, David Davis, Liam Fox et al – are furious too. The industry points out that Huawei kit has already been installed in dozens of cities across the UK and to a more sophisticated standard than the US can currently provide. Ripping it all out would cost billions ...”

“... He makes clear that mobs, mafias and global rackets are often performing useful and occasionally vital social functions that no other institution – governments, legal systems, the police, the economy itself – is capable of providing. It’s usually assumed that organised crime is a network of unqualified evil: murderous, recklessly greedy, the enemy of ...”

“... chieftains, brought to London to ratify a colonial treaty, were taken to a performance in 1710. David Garrick, reviving the play in the 1740s, played Macbeth in the modern red coat of a Georgian general, so that he looked quite like the Duke of Cumberland, known after his treatment of prisoners taken at Culloden as the Butcher of the Scots. The play only ...”

“... in the Scotland of the Covenanters – the early 17th-century Calvinist International had been a vital and pluralistic phenomenon, and far from singlemindedly Calvinist. Trevor-Roper’s real task in his purported biography of Mayerne is the recovery – through the lens of one particular case-study – of a ‘lost moment’ in intellectual history, the ...”

“... liquid bottle (‘cleans, no added promises’) on a fire. Words rear up and loom enormous – David Cameron, for example, may find this with his plan for ‘thrifty government’ – and fizz and collapse and make a nasty smell. It is, I take it, obvious that one of the many things no one particularly needs at the moment is a book that tells you how to ...”

“... am very bad at what I am not good at,’ for example, or ‘Croce, in particular, played a vital role in making me feel better about being mentally undeveloped.’ There’s also a fair amount of straightforward bragging: ‘Nowadays, if I am learning to read a new language, I … ’ and so on. Quite a lot of it is concentrated in the third ...”

“... had two rooms, kitchen and bathroom – what East European biographer could fail to give this vital information?)Antisemitism, largely absent from Bauman’s life since 1939, re-entered it in the early 1950s, as suspicion of Jews mounted in East European and Soviet communist parties. In 1952 a confidential report on Bauman’s army work noted ...”

“... Boston University. The first of them, a satirical attack on The Old Faith and the New, a work of David Strauss’s dotage (1871, English translation 1873), begins with a memorable disclaimer. The German public’s eagerness to infer from the military victory over France a victory over French culture, Nietzsche writes, is a pernicious delusion, ‘not simply ...”

“... at the most optimistic estimate, by around 400,000 by 1984. Moreover, as he acknowledges, one vital element – incomes policy – has not been taken into account in the evaluation of the strategy. Desai also envisages restrictions on the growth of private consumption and a deliberate effort to divert investment into growth industries while phasing out ...”