“... New York Sun ran a sensational scoop: the ‘Great Astronomical Discoveries, Lately Made by Sir John Herschel, L.L.D., F.R.S., &c, at the Cape of Good Hope’. Herschel – former president of the Royal Astronomical Society and son of William Herschel, the discoverer of Uranus – had sailed from Britain to South Africa two years before with a giant ...”

“... out ‘it was snowing butterflies,’ and such in fact was the appearance.In 1845 the publisher John Murray reissued the book for a large public. Darwin became a literary celebrity. Voyage of the Beagle (to use the title Murray gave it) is a vivid travelogue, but it also carries heavy theoretical freight. Darwin was struck by ‘how exactly the animals and ...”

“... culture of the Scottish Enlightenment which Madison acquired at Princeton from the teaching of John Witherspoon. Professor Garry Wills has now followed Adair and extended his thesis in producing an interpretation of Madison in which the Scottish influence on him has a central place. Wills’s earlier book Inventing America perhaps overstated the case for ...”

“... contributed to a no-nonsense, suck-it-and-see anti-intellectualism. For socialist playwrights like John Arden and Edward Bond, the consequence, in one case, is external and in the other a form of internal exile. But the most noted instance of the prophet rejecting his own country is the director Peter Brook who, having forged a glittering career in the British ...”

“... with longer histories of industrialisation. (Those of us for whom Sunday lunch with the in-laws is the stuff of horror fiction must assume for the moment that this is a good thing.) On the other hand, if you hanker after the kind of contentment that results from a slow-moving, patriarchal and religious way of life you will be largely disappointed. As ...”

“... The laws of hospitality are older than the laws of the United States of America!’ Diane di Prima shouted at the FBI agents who came to her cold-water apartment in Manhattan in 1956, looking for a young dissident writer from Yugoslavia. It was her first encounter with ‘the Big Reality that had undone so much of Hollywood, of New York ...”

“... into battle, patronised painters and builders, governed the country, and made and modified its laws. By contrast, they spent little of their time, and fewer of their resources, on doing good works. From Edward II until William and Mary, they presented maundy money to a handful of deserving indigents once each year; and from the Normans until the early ...”

“... to the efficacy of the law against matricide: it assumes rather a lot both about people and about laws. It certainly does nothing to elevate Posner’s cost-benefit analysis of sexual choice above what it is: an algebraic metaphor for some debatable facts. Elsewhere in the volume Posner himself considers the use of metaphor in legal reasoning. The ...”

“... picture of the electromagnetic ether; how to distinguish between dynamical and merely probable laws of nature; and how to leave a space for free will. The first of these puzzles emerged in the 1850s, when Maxwell, fresh from his triumphs in the prestigious Cambridge mathematics course, set out to reinterpret Faraday’s experiments on batteries, wires and ...”

“... human subjecthood was freedom, whereas the objective historical process was governed by inexorable laws. Some Marxists had problems with the first bit of this, since it smacked of laissez-faire; but it was hard to reject freedom out of hand and still clamour for social change. Marx himself sometimes sounds as though he is a determinist, and sometimes not. The ...”

“... still policed its own members and more than a few were called to the bar for going too far. Sir John Coventry, whose story is told in Patterson’s dazzling prelude, might not have had his nose slit open, supposedly with the king’s approval, if he had been disciplined by his peers for casting aspersions on the king’s morals. The privacy of debate was ...”

“... with ministers who were either secret Communists or Communist sympathisers. Given the fierce libel laws in this country there was no way such allegations could be published in the normal manner. Instead MI5 leaked the smear to journalists who obligingly wrote stories hinting at the substance, while sometimes hypocritically expressing their distaste: ‘some ...”

“... which had been suddenly transformed by the scientists into a vast machine governed by mathematical laws, where God had become a remote first cause and man an insignificant “reas’ning Engine” ’; he was trying to escape from ‘the Cartesian-Newtonian world picture, a civilised city of good taste, common sense and reason’. Apart from the fact that ...”

“... New York journal on 18 February. This was not a new sentiment in the United States. In 1823 John Quincy Adams had suggested that ‘there are laws of political as well as of physical gravitation,’ so all New World Newtons ought to know what to do: if an apple, severed by the tempest from its native tree, cannot ...”

“... of the affairs of the kingdom and in determining or choosing those that shall determine what laws we shall be ruled by here – no person has a right to this that hath not a permanent fixed interest in the kingdom.’ After all, he went on (and on and on) was there not a danger that a parliament elected by the people might confiscate property? And if ...”