“... its severe abstract propositions enact a quest for truth pursued in relation to the purest laws of language. Only her ‘strict eyes’, he argues in ‘The Taint’, might free him from the moral and aesthetic failings bequeathed him by a ‘dishonest’ mother and a compromising father: Agree, it is better to confess The occasion of my rottenness ...”

“... economics to its ‘roots where it seeks to understand’ – in Marx’s phrase – ‘the “laws of motion” of capitalism’. Martin Wolf in the Financial Times wrote that ‘in its scale and sweep’ Capital in the 21st Century ‘brings us back to the founders of political economy’. The inadequacy of mainstream economics in the face of the ...”

“... race; most of them lived elsewhere, often in Spain, which was far more lax about enforcing drug laws. Everyone knew the difference: ‘Racers used to say you could tape EPO syringes to your forehead and you wouldn’t get busted in Spain.’ Armstrong moved himself and some of his teammates to Girona, a small town in north-east Catalonia. Still, once he ...”

“... Democrats have reason to style themselves as a party of order, which also must mean obedience to laws, since they are depending on the courts and the intelligence community to save the country from Trump – depending on them, indeed, with a simple fervour that approaches the condition of prayer. And yet for some time, going back as far as the summer of ...”

“... right to have the sex we want without being punished for it.’ But the history of miscegenation laws makes this wish less gay-specific than Bersani claims, and in any case does not begin to describe what it is that gay men want. What I want at the moment, for example, includes at least four other things besides sex with impunity. I want to be rid of the ...”

“... produced less certainty about who really did what to whom than if Jeremy Thorpe, George Deakin, David Holmes and John Le Mesurier had been invited to take off their shoes and socks and walk along a trench full of glowing charcoal. As with the trench method, the populace gathered to watch or to read about how the defendants survived this ...”

“... democracy has been poisoned by repressive legislation’ which in many ways resembles the kind of laws the Civil Rights movement set out to change in Northern Ireland. The recent, hasty legislation which prevents convicted terrorists standing for election in Northern Ireland is another example of this sapping of legality and so, too, is the case of Constable ...”

“... picked up by law enforcement agencies around the world as the authorities struggled to modernise laws and investigative techniques designed to deal with old-fashioned varieties of organised crime. Glenny covered the Balkans during the collapse of the Soviet Union, and wrote three ambitious histories of the region. His fourth book, McMafia, examined how the ...”

“... But in his own eyes he remained the gangling, untidy public school rebel, still recognisable in David Hockney’s official portrait of him as Provost. ‘Quirky, unpredictable, a believer that truth emerges from contradiction, a roughneck in argument’, according to Noel Annan, his predecessor as Provost of King’s. His friend Audrey Richards said that he ...”

“... did not edit the Bannatyne Manuscript. It was edited by his colleague in the Court of Session, Sir David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes, whose Annals led Sir Walter Scott to laud him as ‘the restorer of Scottish history’. Does it matter that the notorious cry of ‘Whaur’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?’ greeted Home’s tragedy in London, not Edinburgh? It ...”

“... into a unified theory, that Hume rightly treats particular causal statements as entailing causal laws, and that causal relations hold between events. I subscribe to most of these theses, though not to all of them. I think that the authors are right in treating Hume’s definitions of cause as complementary rather than inconsistent. They are right also, in my ...”

“... Indeed, he complained about plans to publish some of the correspondence of his late friend David Hume, because it would encourage hacks and hucksters to ‘set about rummaging the cabinets of all those who had ever received a scrap of paper from him. Many things would be published not fit to see the light to the great mortification of all those who ...”

“... man and liberator of the slaves, has been the subject of more than 16,000 books, according to David S. Reynolds’s new biography, Abe. That’s around two a week, on average, since the end of the American Civil War. Almost every possible Lincoln can be found in the historical literature, including the moralist who hated slavery, the pragmatic politician ...”

“... been put up in a hurry. Although we have been cured of follies on the grand scale by planning laws, the urgent need to build and decorate can still become detached from a monitoring sense of function. Almost the last example in the book is a bus, parked in a garden on South Uist, which the owner has covered in patterns with shells from the local ...”

“... If the publishers thought they were going to get the kind of sputtering firework that one of David Frost’s script associates might help him deliver into a tape-recorder, they haven’t. This is a book meant to be read and even kept. Indeed it might have more keepers than readers, since a probable majority of buyers will be the people mentioned in the ...”