“... In the movie, however, it provides the occasion for one of Hollywood’s happy endings, in which John Quincy Adams moves the Supreme Court to a recognition of human rights by eloquently invoking the Declaration of Independence. Unfortunately, this never happened. The justices did, indeed, send the Africans home, but their decision turned on maritime law and ...”

“... John Wieners​ once told his nephew he had met the Virgin Mary. ‘Did she say anything to you?’ Walter asked. ‘No,’ John said, ‘she doesn’t know how to speak.’ He paused. ‘But she’s learning.’ Wieners was born to a working-class family outside Boston in 1934, educated by Jesuits, and spent formative periods of his youth in New York, San Francisco and Black Mountain, North Carolina ...”

“... Medieval political theorists devoted anguished thought to these questions. In the 12th century, John of Salisbury urged tyrannicide as a political duty. ‘Whoever does not prosecute’ a tyrant, he wrote in his Policraticus, ‘transgresses against himself and against the whole body’ of the republic. In 1407 his theory was put to the test when ...”

“... of the law of treason by Eyre (which has recently attracted renewed ironical attention from John Barrell) which was hurled into print on the very eve of the notorious Treason Trials of 1794. The second piece is the ‘Considerations’ on the Two Acts (1795), in which Godwin seemed to come forward (anonymously) to condone legislation against popular ...”

“... for the occasional off-day, I cannot believe that any spirit worth his salt would challenge the laws of physics by bending tea-spoons, or would challenge the will of living human beings by telling them to fuck off and get some jazz music. We live, I know, in a changing world, but not surely a world in which the entelechy which orders the super-natural ...”

“... also looked after his father’s jobs in Cambridge, probably including the grand new chapel for St John’s College. Then, suddenly, according to Stamp, ‘some of his old Eton friends persuaded him to enter the University.’ At 24, his was a mature admission. He graduated top of the Moral Sciences Tripos for 1866. Next, he won a prize for an essay on ‘The ...”

“... Later we had other Popes who, we were told, were also jolly good, but even the warm feeling about John XXIII never approached the devotional cult around Pius XII. There was a sense of real surprise that he wasn’t beatified and canonised as soon as he died. The nuns had told us that he couldn’t officially be declared a saint while he was alive but once he ...”

“... captains: William West, killed fighting the Powhatans, and Gabriel Archer, an enemy of Captain John Smith, a self-aggrandising swashbuckler and leader of the Virginia Colony. All four died between 1608 or 1610, years remembered as ‘the starving time’, when desperate colonists first ate snakes and frogs, then boots and belts, and finally one ...”

“... have little to do with them. They are wrong, but who can blame them? Henry Raeburn’s ‘John Johnstone, Betty Johnstone and Miss Wedderburn’ (c.1790-95). Emma Rothschild has a written a strange, immensely thoughtful book which at first glance ought to complement Devine’s work. But it does nothing of the sort, attending instead to the history ...”

“... wean the Chinese electorate from its allegiance to radical leaders, and how to sell the emergency laws that would ensnare them without seeming like a pro-British lackey. His first bit of luck came in 1956, when Lim, who had just won a seat for the PAP in Bukit Timah to become an MP at 22, was arrested by the British after being falsely accused of inciting a ...”

“... country … The silence, I find, is a factor which has enabled the evil to spread.’ Likewise John Gordon, in the Sunday Express, who seized on John Gielgud’s arrest for importuning in 1953 as a chance to rip aside the ‘protective veil’ of delicacy around this ‘repulsive’ and ‘peculiarly ...”

“... and duffing them up a bit – for instance, imagining what it would look like if a society with no laws were turned over to the free will of self-denominated geniuses. Well, someone has done that, except it isn’t a book or movie, it’s a video game. BioShock, which came out in 2007, was conceived by Ken Levine and developed by 2K Boston/2K Australia, and is ...”

“... Constitution under any conditions, that it was incapable of coming to any agreement or of creating laws, there wouldn’t have been any bloodshed. There wouldn’t have been any victims. There wouldn’t have been any moral shock, we all felt. There wouldn’t have been the schism among democratic groupings in society that threatened to escalate into a new ...”

“... that happens must also have made its representation both arduous and disappointing – the natural laws are not so easily bent on stage. Roussel paid for everything, it seems: the hire of the theatre, the cast, the effects, the sets. This first time round, the Impressions lasted only two nights, because Roussel’s mother then died and he called it off; six ...”

“... for cash in the recession-hit 1460s, Edward made ‘great boast’ of the loyalty of men like John Say, a shrewd financial administrator; and when, in 1471, he all but eradicated the house of Lancaster in a bloody sequence of battles – among the few survivors was the 14-year-old Henry Tudor, who fled into exile in Brittany – he welcomed into his ...”