“... characters’ heroic struggle to master the material conditions of their world (technology, the laws of physics, the elemental forces of weather) was reduced to mere clumsiness.’*Faced​ with his character’s lack of agency on screen and the lack of affection at home, Keaton retreated to his baseball (the ‘MGM Lions’), his bungalow (‘Keaton’s ...”

“... of State for Foreign Affairs. That was fully up to the level of prickliness displayed by John Thadeus Delane, editor of the Times, in his famous exchange with Lord Derby over the accession to power of Napoleon III 28 years earlier, and serves to show that, even if the Standard had allowed its financial independence to be corrupted, it never permitted ...”

“... and tone is part of the method. It ensures that the reviewer’s prejudices will not harden into laws; the momentum of the sentences he hands down will always carry him towards self-revelation. This use of semi-colons exemplifies Empson’s belief that ideas are created and developed through dialogue. ‘Controversy demands imagination; you must try to ...”

“... Even incidentally, there’s a broad, unlikely set of references to literature – to Saki and John Fowles and Gatsby’s ‘old sport’. In more detail, a character called Clem Snide does a Sam Spade impression and spends his days checking into Hiltons on a headless-body murder investigation. The case involves drugs, black magic and an Egyptian sunset ...”

“... scorn and contempt, either by laughter, or by words, or by gesture’. A few decades later, John Locke too ‘spoke against raillery’. It had ‘dangerous consequence if not well managed’ and he urged young people to abstain from it. He was a celebrated mimic, who took pride in his own wit, yet he considered jokes risky because they easily gave ...”

“... early history of species ‘bagging’ in North America. Every ornithologist will know the name of John James Audubon, but there were many other impressive pioneers in recording life on the continent. I hadn’t realised the extent to which Thomas Jefferson, for example, engaged in speculation about the affinities of fossilised mammoth bones that had turned up ...”

“... argue that the protections furnished by the US constitution do not apply to Guantanamo Bay. Even John Gibbons, who argued the case on behalf of Rasul, had to admit that the legal status of Guantanamo is ‘unique’. While other naval bases have had to bring their legal position into line with the laws of the host ...”

“... mental isolation and the strain of concealment. Loveless marriages cause more lasting grief than laws, and still do. Robb argues that the plight of the homosexual, as regards the law but not only the law, actually grew considerably worse during much of the 20th century. For instance, according to his statistics, arrests and convictions for ‘gross ...”

“... they owed to their sovereign and the example they ought to give to the country in obedience to its laws, to fight a duel’. The editorial lamented that affairs of state should be entrusted by the king ‘to persons whose intemperate passions were so little under the control of reason’. So it proved. Canning recovered from his wound but both men had to ...”

“... socialist economy, get anything from Milton Friedman – as you could, say, from Paul Samuelson or John Kenneth Galbraith, two US economists who are well-known in reformist circles and the availability of whose work in translation pre-dates Gorbachev. Does Aganbegyan not understand this? Or is he, in the Soviet way, inscribing his support for Friedman’s ...”

“... bipolar Kulturkampf, it did leak out to a wide public through the fictions of Len Deighton and John Le Carré. Watching the shadow-play on the walls of the Cold War cave, and seeing the literal interpenetration of opposites as Karla penetrated ‘us’, and ‘we’ reciprocated, one could make the induction that the spy game was a thing in itself, and ...”

“... voters in 1945; or a better comparison might be with the United States in 1960, when the dazzling John F. Kennedy seemed to represent the beginning of a new age after what his supporters saw as the suffocating and mediocre years of President Eisenhower. The under-forties in particular, in Australia in 1972 as in the United States in 1960, suddenly felt ...”

“... World War One to stop rack-renting of small tenements; the race, sex and disability discrimination laws and so forth. Legislation has been needed, too, to bring into being systems of adjudication and distribution of public funds in schemes of social provision such as the national insurance and social security systems. On all of these, however, the common law ...”

“... The police attack the protesters, and their numbers swell. The president pushes through draconian laws against the demonstrators. Evoking a heroic tradition of resistance to occupation by Nazis and communists, militant protesters attempt to march on parliament, battling the police, who respond by murdering more than a hundred people. Despite reaching an ...”

“... public services and then in 1954 forbade it? How does it come about that not dissimilar abortion laws have in recent years been struck down by Canada’s Supreme Court as too restrictive and by Germany’s Constitutional Court as too permissive? On our own patch, how did it come to be self-evident to the Court of Appeal in 1925 that it was perfectly all ...”