“... was not invariably all that different from the rest of Europe. By the same token, Mrs Thatcher may believe that Magna Carta secured liberty more effectively than did the French Revolution. But there has as yet been no revival of a British history emphasising native constitutional achievements. Indeed, some of the most unabashed Tory historians seem far ...”

“... the chief legal effects of marriage during the coverture’, Blackstone wrote, ‘upon which we may observe, that even the disabilities, which the wife lies under, are for the most part intended for her protection and benefit. So great a favourite is the female sex of the laws of England.’ Perhaps not surprisingly, Blackstone’s sisters now tell a ...”

“... intuition and the desired answer is a matter of complex negotiation, in which some intuitions may have to be disregarded, it remains true that a satisfying conclusion is at peace with intuition, or, anyway, with the stronger or less deniable part of it. Nagel has been at the centre of Anglophone philosophical endeavour for twenty-five years because he ...”

“... historians which lies outside my competence. Another such issue is whether 18th-century England may properly be called, as in the title of Paul Langford’s recent book, ‘a polite and commercial people’: a title which draws from Thompson the observation that ‘historical conferences on 18th-century questions tend to be places where the bland lead the ...”

“... the film The American Dreamer meets his match in the man who now redeems An American Dream. There may have been much of Mailer in Gilmore, too, the religious, superstitious, existentialist Gilmore. But it is part of the simple sanity of the book that such things are now subjected to an intimate vigilance. ‘Whether the life is criminal or not,’ Mailer once ...”

“... to Melchior’s father from his agents in Paris, Berlin, London and Prague, each of whom, one may assume, had been given certain guidelines on what to buy, since, for example, the London agent appears to have bought mostly finely-illustrated ornithological texts; the Paris agent, new books from the private presses; the Berlin agent, bound collections of ...”

“... Sindona were members of P2 and both contributed extensively to Gelli’s financial activities. In May 1981, P2 was exposed in a blaze of publicity which kept every newspaper and television station in Italy busy for months, brought down the Government, and ultimately led to the election of the first non-Christian Democrat prime minister since the war. The ...”

“... Neostoicism is neither as difficult nor as remote a subject as it may sound, although to grasp its full importance we would need a keener sense than most of us have of the pressing relevance of Classical Antiquity to the thought and values of Renaissance Europe. The term is given by historians to the cult of Stoic ethics – especially of Senecan ethics – at the courts and universities of the late 16th and early 17th centuries ...”

“... relevant to the assessment of the truth value of moral statements; 4. There are moral facts (that may or may not be claimed to be reducible in some way to non-moral facts); 5. When two moral statements conflict as recommendations to action, only one statement can be true; 6. There is a single true morality. 7. ‘When ...”

“... Colour School’, did not represent the breakthrough that other critics had announced. In May 1983 he declared that Fairfield Porter ‘is going to have to be recognised as one of the classics of our art’. As for ‘neo-expressionism’ and ‘maximalism’, the latest, or almost the latest, thing, he notes that, unlike Pop Art, which made an ...”

“... upon Harold Jenkins’s magisterial Arden and Philip Edwards’s serious Cambridge version.1 It may well be asked by non-Shakespearians and non-publishers whether all this editorial activity is needed, and by whom, and the Oxford team anticipates the question by asserting the boldness as well as the unparalleled scope of its enterprise. It is worth asking ...”

“... Quite early one May morning, in the last days of a subarctic winter, I strayed from a marked trail I had been walking for just under two hours and discovered I was lost in the north Norwegian tundra. It was something that never should have happened: 99 times out of a hundred, I am a sensible, even cautious wanderer, but that morning, in an odd mood I couldn’t explain other than to say, lamely, that I was sorry to be leaving Finnmark, I had left the borrowed lakeside cabin where I’d been staying and decided to go for one last walk along a not at all hazardous eight-mile trail about thirty miles east of Kautokeino ...”

“... you construct. If as many Google-enabled robotic devices get installed as Google hopes, Google may soon know the contents of your fridge, your heart rate when you’re exercising, the weather outside your front door, the pattern of electricity use in your home. Google knows or has sought to know, and may increasingly ...”

“... wife, Hedli, ‘my trouble all my life … has been over-production.’ That vast output of books may be one reason it’s taken a while to see how good a lot of the poetry actually is. He tried out styles obsessively, used any device you can think of, and in content embraced pretty much everything from the jazz and stockings and Johnnie Walker of Autumn ...”

“... stuff of Shakespeare’, but that surely is letting everyone concerned off far too lightly. He may just be a smooth-talking thug, and many online observers have noted that he seems to model himself on the smooth-talking thug and would-be businessman Stringer Bell from The Wire. But the word that best captures Saif Gaddafi comes from Nicholas Shaxson’s ...”