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“... it happens a former student of Lessig’s at the University of Chicago, where he was in the same class as the anti-Trump Republican Liz Cheney. Eastman’s feeble argument – that Vice President Mike Pence was empowered to overturn Democratic slates from contested states – drew on a ‘thin reed of evidence’ from the electoral counts of 1796 and 1800. A ...”

“... statistician-cum-metaphysician.Although his history has an 18th-century prologue and a post-World War Two epilogue, the real action takes place c.1835-1935, when governments in Europe and the US established official statistical bureaux, when there was quantitative data-gathering on an unprecedented scale, when social reformers looked to statistics to diagnose ...”

“... Joyce was too ashamed of his scarcely literate beloved to introduce her to his intellectual middle-class friends or to a father who had quite other aspirations for him. To be with Nora in Ireland would mean a battle with his father and would badly damage his image; but how long would a girl be faithful if her man kept treating her as a mistress? If they ...”

“... Garvey out of America. Similarly, the Hoover who turned his malign attention upon the anti-Vietnam War movement was the same man who had, half a century before, hounded Emma Goldman and John Reed and, later, put Leon Trotsky under surveillance in Mexico. This longevity makes Hoover’s biography a wonderful subject. Powers’s book is painfully neutral and ...”

“... of power – differed in recruitment to office, focus of allegiance, relation to land, role in war, function in learning. Nor was the machinery of power at all alike. The Heavenly Kingdom commanded, in principle and in normal times in practice, an effective monopoly of armed force. The Shogunate did not even control a majority of the military levies in ...”

“... who were able to stay up hours of pleasure ahead. It was like a scene from a Hollywood musical, a class of film I detested for their lack of rectitude, or their dissolution of the unities of time and place to which I was so attached. Nevertheless I had drifted far enough out on thoughts of dancing the night away, and of hearing the milkman on his round, and ...”

“... in office. With this generalised involution has come a pervasive corruption of the political class, a topic on which political science, talkative enough on what in the language of accountants is termed the democratic deficit of the Union, typically falls silent. The forms of this corruption have yet to find a systematic taxonomy. There is pre-electoral ...”

“... which even the simplest wording conceals. In this way, if one looked no further than the school class room and the university seminar, it would seem that history in the Seventies, as in the previous decade, was progressively decentred to the point where its autonomous existence, as a teaching subject or a ‘discipline’, was in doubt. It was extra-murally ...”

“... Burke lived at the same time and in the same country: but at opposite ends of the spectrum of class, ends which rarely met, except in court. Such people were strangers to one another, foreigners, and could hate and suspect one another in the style that has been reserved for foreigners. Smith and Burke lived for a while in the same place, Edinburgh – the ...”

“... out to command the means of ending everything. By l9l9, the arms race has produced its world war, and the ‘aerial battleship’ designed at the Undershaft factory has evolved into the bomber that bombs Heartbreak House. It is not Wagner, one of the mythologists of the end of everything, but a composer with a bigger popular vote than Shaw’s propaganda ...”

“... which swelled in successive editions to include more than four thousand sayings and proverbs (‘war is sweet to those who have not tried it’), many of which were accompanied by extensive glosses. The Adagia went through around 150 editions in the 16th century, and was quoted, cut, expanded, reprinted, requoted and translated more times than anyone can ...”

“... remarkable for a clever and ambitious son of assimilated Jews growing up after the First World War in a sophisticated neighbourhood near the Tiergarten. He captured these years in an essay he wrote at the Französisches Gymnasium when he was 17. He had been reading Hegel. The relations between parents and children, he declared, are boringly ...”

“... the sniffiness with which he was viewed by the small, determinedly self-improving black middle class, which wasn’t at first thrilled by the outside world’s interest in some ‘damn nasty Rasta’, all ‘ganja smell and frowsy arm’, as an angry mother puts it. Other characters do impressions of foreign music-business types – ‘You reggae dudes are ...”

“... the Communist Party was becoming an apprenticeship and ‘a practical goal’ for many working-class French committed to another version of society: membership would eventually peak at around one million, with a popular vote of five million. The French party went on to internalise whatever was good about the Soviet model and repress the remainder: as ...”

“... It’s nice​ to settle in with an old-fashioned story of inheritances, dramatic shifts in social class and the occasional total eclipse of the Sun. Dava Sobel’s The Glass Universe: The Hidden History of the Women Who Took the Measure of the Stars begins in the late 19th century, following the story of the women (and a few men, too) who worked at the Harvard College Observatory computing the location and brightness of the stars ...”