“... should be developed piecemeal over a period of fifty years. As a result, both the distribution of powers and the language used to describe them is often opaque. Comprising 20 Commissioners and eighteen thousand officials to do their bidding, the Commission represents the so-called ‘supranational’ model. The current President, Romano Prodi, has described ...”

“... daily administration of justice’ caused by Fascism’s ‘failure to respect the separation of powers’. Readers will struggle to find such a careful analysis; besides which, in Italy, a failure to observe Montesquieu’s ideal separation of powers can hardly be considered a prerogative of the Fascist regime. What is ...”

“... a first bibliography, and respectful salutations from across the literary scene: Dylan Thomas emerged best from the exercise, warmly praising ‘a wide and deep poet’ before adding, impishly: ‘Congratulations on Auden’s seventieth birthday.’ He did indeed seem senior beyond his years. The issue had a double-page Faber advert, on one side of ...”

“... however, Garrow is an object of contempt. He rates over ten times as many index entries as Thomas Erskine, a more important figure, because he is the exemplar for a thesis which rings through the book like the 13th chime of the clock – that where the old form of English trial was a truth-seeking process, albeit an inefficient one, the modern ...”

“... in British reforming circles and even more so among their Revolutionary American cousins. Thomas Jefferson regarded it as belonging with the handful of books essential for understanding the new forms of civil government being built in America. Capital punishment was not abolished in any of the new American jurisdictions, despite the efforts of some of ...”

“... charge was false, but in the following year the political world was rocked by the poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury in the Tower by agents of the wife of the king’s then leading minister, Overbury’s enemy the Earl of Somerset. The stories that came out, of the drugging of tarts and jellies and wine smuggled into the Tower, roused an intensity of interest ...”

“... and estimation, whether the message couldn’t have been delivered a little more crisply. Thomas Carlyle certainly thought so: the poem, he declared, was ‘all made out of an Old Bailey story that might have been told in ten lines and only wants forgetting’. It is not in fact that easy to tell the story in ten lines – Browning’s most concise ...”

“... difficulty of finding servants, staying with Max Beerbohm, the Test series, his first meeting with Thomas Hardy, the shortcomings of his wife/son/daughter-in-law, his neglect by the critics – this last a recurring theme. ‘They don’t understand what a talent I have for light verse.’ He had no pudeur about expressing his resentments or his ...”

“... order was therefore an individual and a societal imperative. Tyndall’s main inspiration was Thomas Carlyle, along with transcendental idealist philosophers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Ralph Waldo Emerson. (Carlyle was Tyndall’s supporter at his wedding in 1876, Tyndall a pallbearer at Carlyle’s funeral in 1881.) To labour towards higher ...”

“... Elton tells us that knowing about history does not make a man wise or endow him with prophetic powers. But trying to be a prophet can mar him as a historian. It was not Elton who said that the only lesson of history is that there are no lessons to be learned from history, but he could have said it. The historian is the ultimate sceptic, mankind’s ...”

“... frends and kindsfolks that are neare about Her Majestie must prosecute yt to the uttermost of oure powers.’ It is not surprising that he was liked only by those from whom he sought favour. The romantic and the dewy-eyed might want to invent a love affair between the ageing queen and the handsome nephew of her former governess to explain Ralegh’s rise to ...”

“... after. Among much rustling of silks, a daughter decorously pours tea, while his eldest son, Thomas, just returned from the Varsity, stands behind his father in full academic dress reading, one imagines, some Latin poem. And symbolically at least, the Tyers have a special guest in their bourgeois parlour, confirming their status. On the chimneypiece is a ...”

“... propagated the faith after his death, and of Cobdenite mandarins such as Louis Mallet and Thomas Farrer, is a timely reminder of just how powerfully ingrained liberal commercial values became. Pure Cobdenism was a form of humanitarian cosmopolitanism, based on the international brotherhood of man. Practical Cobdenism, as it evolved in the 1850s and ...”

“... and sculpture. Pietro Bembo’s concluding Neoplatonic evocation, in poetic prose, of love’s powers and properties, may seem more embarrassing than engrossing. Women appear regularly but they play strictly regulated roles, organising discussion and playfully slapping down the ill-mannered speakers who try to go too far. As always in societies governed by ...”

“... in Fraser’s words), government money flowed in and production was massively ramped up. The Axis powers were out-smelted, but at a cost: out of the effluent-saturated Northwest of the 1940s and 1950s, Fraser contends, arose ‘the greatest generation of serial killers’. From the age of four, Bundy was breathing particulates from the Ruston smokestack ...”