“... the most deliberate experimentation. We are in a region where one is tempted to say there are no laws. But there are: their presence is only to be inferred from what we can tell is an offence against them, or what we recognise as a triumphant observance. Writing is full of unwritten laws, and attempts at codification can ...”

“... it had published which described Jesus having sex with a variety of men, including Pontius Pilate. John Mortimer and Geoffrey Robertson appeared for the defence, but lost. Gay News was fined and its publisher given a suspended prison sentence. ‘I have an open mind about queer-bashing,’ Waugh’s diary reflected, ‘from one point of view it seems rather ...”

“... Peter Chamberlen’s The Poore Mans Advocate (1649), Peter Cornelius Plockhoy (1659), John Bellers’s Proposals for Raising a College of Industry (1695), and two essays by an anonymous Hermeticist, Philadept, published in 1698 and 1700. Many in this last group were discussed in 1952 by J.K. Fuz in a pioneering work, Welfare Economics in English ...”

“... if ‘a man, a dog, or a cat escape quick out of the ship’, then it was subject to the usual laws of ownership. The merchants who had shipped the cargo should pay the salvagers ‘convenient for their travail’ in recovering it, but they were entitled to have their goods back in full if crewmen survived. Only if a ship was fully abandoned or the crew ...”

“... of enthusiasm of the annus mirabilis, 1650, with its heresiarchs, prophets and messiahs, with John Robins and Thomas Tany, with its ‘witchcraft fits’ and speaking with tongues, provided the odium of example which sobriety needed. Davis has therefore written a book which is silly and unnecessary. No one has ever pretended that the Ranters were ...”

“... ambitions could ignore the deeply ingrained racism of Illinois. The state’s notorious Black Laws denied Blacks basic rights, and racist language suffused politics. In the 1858 debates during the campaign for one of Illinois’s seats in the Senate, Lincoln’s antagonist, Senator Stephen A. Douglas, freely used the word ‘nigger’ and accused Lincoln ...”

“... the Department of Trade and Industry or the Ministry of Defence – they were lectured about the laws of the marketplace. Good riddance, too, was the message for Westlands from the other big helicopter-makers of Europe. Fewer and fewer helicopters were needed, because fewer and fewer people (or countries) could afford them. There was what businessmen call ...”

“... of Fox into a strong coalition government; instead, he formed a weak, untalented administration John Ehrman’s final volume deals with the years from 1797 to Pitt’s death early in 1806. His biography is on a scale which might be called ‘Victorian’ except that most of the great biographies of Victorian politicians appeared in this century. According ...”

“... till blood and froth stood on his chin. The froth stands when the cousin falls, and even the laws of gravity seem upset. ‘Jim said little when his kin/found a place to place him in’.: the original shock of witnessing the seizures compounds Murray’s horror at a family which could simply institutionalise Jim, which fell down where it should have ...”

“... The pogrom in Limerick, which took place in 1904, was incited by the fiery preaching of Father John Creagh to the arch-confraternity: The Jews came to Limerick apparently the most miserable tribe imaginable ... but now they had enriched themselves and could boast of very considerable house property in the city. Their rags have been exchanged for ...”

“... in East Anglia. After his enthusiasm for this sort of thing came to light, the Sun contacted John Hanson, one of the book’s authors, who declared that ‘any sensible person’ would be interested in a phenomenon ‘that has baffled mankind for millennia’.The extent to which Philip was a sensible person remains open to debate, but as a UFO buff who ...”

“... is always fascinated by what is irresolvable – ‘Keep we must, if keep we can/These foreign laws of God and man’ – and his scholarly prose concerned, above all, with such textual resolutions as are possible in a world of inevitably corrupt classical texts. Having lost his faith at 13 – though never his interest in the Bible, as Archie Burnett’s ...”

“... thesis. A very good case could be made in favour of Spender’s assertion: ‘If the laws of literary criticism were to be made explicit they would require as their first entry that the sex of the author is the single most important factor in any test of greatness and in any preservation for posterity.’ Spender fails to make this case mainly ...”

“... will already know that Lincoln has four more years to live before he is shot by Herold’s friend, John Wilkes Booth, the most notorious of all those Americans who have sought to win fame by killing heroes and idols. In this urgent manner, blending the legendary and the humdrum, Gore Vidal introduces his story, like a 20th-century version of a Greek tragedy ...”

“... and Censor’. St Clair quotes Eldon in 1793, when he was only attorney general and called Sir John Scott, telling an author that he could continue to publish his reply to Burke in ‘an octavo form so as to confine it probably to that class of readers who may consider it coolly’ (that is, people who would be unlikely to approve of it), but that as soon ...”