“... stretching upwards, but perhaps true ambition has a pair of silent claws. None of us identified David Cameron as the boy marching inexorably towards Downing Street. When he became Tory leader in 2005, I had difficulty recalling him: wasn’t he that affable, sweet-faced, minor fellow at the edge of things? I remembered him as quite handsome, with the ...”

“... War. Hersh wanted the story to speak for itself. He finally gave it to the independent journalist David Obst’s Dispatch News Service. Thirty-six newspapers picked up the story, but the New York Times wasn’t among them; Time, Newsweek and the television networks ignored it. Self-censorship was pervasive. The Washington Post was an exception: the Post’s ...”

“... writers who have perpetrated the most evil among men.’ If Locke has a competitor in this, it is David Hume, ‘the most culpable of these fatal writers who will not cease to damn the [18th] century in the eyes of posterity, the one who has used the most talent with the most composure to produce the most evil.’ Europe is in chaos because intellectuals like ...”

“... and political platform for Labour, has been elaborated with the help of Tony Blair’s adviser, David Miliband, and sees Blair’s election as leader as an epochal event, finally settling Labour’s commitment to social democracy. All of which sounds very much as if Hutton hopes to become a key adviser in a future Blair administration, though the Tories may ...”

“... the human mind. Metaphysical principles – such as the notion that all events happen according to laws of nature, or that total quantities of matter are always conserved, or that every event has a cause, or that the natural sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics – were not propositions, but ‘presuppositions’. And all such presuppositions were ...”

“... eventually led to the club closing down. To be fair, the smoking ban and a change in the drinking laws prepared the way, but the Colony was enamoured of past afternoons, when illicit really meant something. In Wojas’s day, the idea of a radical act was to enter the whole club for the Turner Prize.There were certain especially instructive figures, among them ...”

“... lightens the darkness of Pinocchio’s experiences with his jaunty tunes and simple moral laws. Take the straight and narrow path And if you start to slide Give a little whistle! Give a little whistle! And always let your conscience be your guide. In Carlo Collodi’s original, there is no time or inclination for moral whistling. Peasant Tuscany in ...”

“... the idea that Neolithic nomads couldn’t wait to settle down, cultivate grain, obey laws and pay taxes – while David Graeber and David Wengrow, in The Dawn of Everything, recovered evidence that humanity has experimented with forms of collective life beyond the modern ...”

“... the murder of her husband by her lover. ‘We seldom can, they are moulded for us – just by the laws and rules and conventions of this world.’ Thompson wasn’t wrong about the way in which women’s lives are made to fit particular shapes: the press dubbed her the ‘Messalina of Ilford’, after the ‘promiscuous’ wife of Emperor Claudius, killed for ...”

“... and cruelty. Sewall’s Mabel is generous, naive and true; her gentle intellectual husband, David Todd, reveres his wife’s lover and is himself so devoted to her that he cannot bear to stand in the way of her happiness with this other man. Gordon sees these three quite differently. Her David is a philanderer who ...”

“... where he lapsed into a state of knee-knocking shock. Another Englishman, the Lancastrian David Lloyd, was hit a terrifying blow in the groin by Jeff Thomson. The following summer, I too hit him in the same region. I saw him later, ice packs clasped to his nether regions, and asked after his health. ‘After Thommo it were a pleasure,’ he ...”

“... is a monument to white supremacy. The book and film offer different variations on the theme: the David O. Selznick production replaced Mitchell’s celebration of the Ku-Klux-Klan with a visually unforgettable paean to ‘the cavalier society’ of antebellum Atlanta, with its ‘knights and ladies, masters and slaves’. Atlanta was actually a frontier ...”

“... wealth on art. There were similar attacks all over Europe, from the British Isles to the Balkans.David Freedberg, who teaches art history at Columbia (and who was, long ago, my dissertation adviser), describes himself as ‘haunted’ by the question of what it is about art that arouses such fierce responses. Most academic art history considers the social ...”

“... powerful may enjoy privacy is when it is the same kind shared by the ordinary: one enforced by the laws of nature, rather than the policies of man. Greenwald next saw some documents. His heart is always racing, he’s always plunging in, getting excited, and he’s always anxious about things falling apart. (He’s that kind of reporter.) But he knows what ...”

“... that even his achievement in health could well be swept away. American politics is propelled by laws quite different from any known in Europe. A great deal may be traced back to the elections of the 1960s. Jeff Manza and Clem Brooks, in their study Social Cleavages and Political Change: Voter Alignments and US Party Coalitions (1999), found that the old ...”