“... of years, but during the quarter century before 1859 more than a dozen northern states enacted laws to conceal their hangings behind prison walls. The courtroom drama was replacing the gallows ritual in the public imagination – and the 26 sentences Brown spoke after the white jury found him guilty secured his place in national legend. Ralph Waldo Emerson ...”

“... and law, but in his own day was a controversial figure. The Provençal rabbi Abraham ben David (‘Rabad’) criticised him for, among other things, his insistence that God is not embodied. After his death in 1204, Jews living in Montpellier helped persuade the Christian authorities to burn copies of his greatest philosophical work, The Guide to the ...”

“... for the fourth time in its brief history, to prevent the resignation of the first minister, David Trimble. Just over a year later, on 26 November 2003, the much postponed Assembly election took place, with the DUP and Sinn Féin emerging as the largest parties, gaining ground from moderate unionists and nationalists. A review of the working of the Good ...”

“... translation. Jeffrey Bernstein has the wordier ‘Which of these two ways is without evil?’ David Mulroy, the punchier ‘Can either choice be right?’ Agamemnon is in a position where there is no right answer, no guiltless way to act.The terrible moment is figured as in part a choice, in part an act of compulsion: Agamemnon ‘placed his neck beneath ...”

“... their ambitions’. But to overestimate their knowledge of and interest in (for example) the laws of optics and aesthetic theory would be to ‘sidetrack an investigation’ and lead to ‘a misapprehension’ of the nature of the Carracci reform. Goldstein examines, as others have, the meanings which can be given to the general thesis that the Carracci ...”

“... 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 ...”