“... and Selwyn Cudjoe, a professor of Black Studies, produced in 1988 a long book called V.S. Nai-paul: A Materialist Reading, which describes Naipaul as ‘an apologist for the imperial world order’, as scornful of Caribbean cultural values and even, in his response to his native Trinidad, ‘psychotic’. He adds that Naipaul is so interested in himself ...”

“... the nephew of the until recently omnipresent Ahmad Chalabi, was handpicked by the US envoy, Paul Bremer, to direct the production. A quick cut-and-paste job provided a statute for the tribunal; a slate of safely anti-Saddam judges was rubber-stamped by Bremer’s Iraqi Governing Council. And after the council had been hastily transformed into a ...”

“... pattern was far more confused … and it was by no means easy to say that decisions were “binding” solely by reason of the source from which they emanated.’ Camden’s court might be ‘bound by’ the earlier cases in the sense that it could not overrule them, but if they were based on false constitutional premises he was not obliged to follow ...”

“... and 17th-century MPs wrote poems or plays, John Lyly and Marvell among them. Literature was a binding force in politics and society. Poets and politicians mingled freely at the Mitre and Mermaid clubs and at the taverns associated with them. Martin Butler has demonstrated the prominence of playgoing in the shaping and sustaining of the political outlook ...”

“... she insisted on – meant that a little of them went a long way. Despite the intermittently spell-binding, Jacobean black humour of Blood and Guts in High School (1978), Great Expectations and Don Quixote, these books were impossible to read cover to cover. Her best-crafted work of this period is the completely linear, episodic Kathy Goes to Haiti (1978), and ...”

“... 2014, the likes of Peter Hain pick their words carefully, while such interlocutors as the blogger Paul Staines (‘Guido Fawkes’), aware of the rules of the game, knowingly play the pantomime villain. Early on, Jones mounts a pre-emptive defence against an accusation he knows is coming. When David Aaronovitch smarmily remarks, one Oxbridge-educated staff ...”

“... was also the unbalanced and paranoid Rousseau whose writings about himself must be disregarded: Paul de Man has suggested that modern critics have fulfilled Rousseau’s fantasies about persecution. There were, in fact, many of his contemporaries who also wished him harm, such as Grimm, Voltaire, Diderot, d’Holbach and various former associates. Rousseau ...”

“... journeys, some profoundly painful memories. And for the people who shared this experience it is a binding force. On the second day of the reunion, the former courtroom photographer Ray D’Addario showed some old newsreel footage, which was silent, of the trials in progress, and all over the darkened room you could hear a low chorus of murmurs and whispers as ...”

“... lives differently could be wielded only with restraint. The Cromartie estate was made by binding together three very distinct units or baronies acquired by the first Earl, lawyer, politician and courtier, whose career bridged the revolution of 1688. He was reputed – and there is no reason to disagree with the repute – thoroughly corrupt. He left ...”

“... as many as twenty different issues a year. Some of these plebiscites – all of which are legally binding – decide fundamental matters like whether the country should have an army. Others concern matters of importance to a local community such as whether a new school should be built or a road improved. Occasionally the votes throw up radical results. In ...”

“... Calvin attacked both pillars of medieval anti-usury reasoning: ancient Jewish law shouldn’t be binding on Christians, so long as lending at interest didn’t violate norms of charity, and Aristotle’s concept of the ‘barrenness’ of money was illogical. Other assets that didn’t bear ‘offspring’, such as houses and land, could generate rent; so ...”

“... constitution: a constitution devised and ratified in the late 18th century, but not one inflexibly binding subsequent generations to that century’s social practices. Things started to change when conservative Republicans on the bench turned to the new jurisprudence of originalism, which ostentatiously deferred to historical values and paved the way for the ...”

“... Britain in 1951 knew what to celebrate. At the start of the opening ceremony – a service in St Paul’s – the King praised the nation’s courage in the world wars; the official handbook declared categorically that ‘Britain is a Christian Community’; brightly coloured pavilions on the South Bank paid tribute to picturesque countryside, seaside ...”

“... its most visible and charismatic face. This group evolved into Médecins sans frontières, which Paul Berman describes in Power and the Idealists (2005) as ‘a more political Red Cross – a Red Cross willing to identify the political realities that create humanitarian crises’. In general, Kouchner thought, the left should not sit around while people got ...”

“... most extended and schematic exorcism of history and mythology. The poem is – to borrow Paul Zweig’s phrase for ‘Song of Myself’ – a ‘therapeutic epic’. Each of its main characters represents an unfortunate aspect of the West Indian inheritance which, as the poem progresses, is either cured or comfortably accommodated. Philoctete, for ...”