“... 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 ...”

“... disqualified business types from public office until they had been retired for ten years. In The Laws, Plato deplores people living near harbours: ‘Although there is sweetness in proximity for the uses of daily life; for by filling the markets of the city with foreign merchandise and retail trading, and by breeding in men’s souls knavish and tricky ...”

“... The engraved frontispiece​ to the 1635 second edition of John Donne’s Poems features a portrait of the artist as an exceedingly young man. Eighteen years old, in loose curls, padded Italian doublet, a single cross-shaped earring and the optimistic hint of a moustache, Donne clutches an oversized sword by the hilt and gazes sidelong at the viewer from beneath provocatively arched brows, a study in adolescent bravado ...”

“... a public and sometimes legislative reaction. Wu’s first example is the draconian anti-poster laws introduced in early 20th-century Paris (and still in force – one reason the city is by contemporary standards undisfigured by ads). As Wu says, ‘when the commodity in question is access to people’s minds, the perpetual quest for growth ensures that ...”

“... who did not want any more children, but these were entirely private and so have gone unrecorded. John Christopoulos has meticulously pieced together a secret history not only from prescriptive sources but from the public records of trials, giving us for the first time a sense of the way early modern women and men experienced abortion. Trials inevitably ...”

“... fragment’, as another character observes) is this rich and dense account of a life rendered. As John Bainbridge sifts through his rag-bag of memories, we close in on the events and people and things that have nearly touched him nearly: the death of a young subaltern in the war, an adulterous affair with his sister-in-law and with many others, a painting, an ...”

“... put it: ‘We’ve given all you people need to know.’ Even Republicans don’t like Mitt. (John McCain thought the inimitable Sarah Palin a better choice as his running mate.) At the convention, it was astonishing how many speakers barely mentioned the presidential candidate at all. In the end, there was almost nothing for a good Republican to say. His ...”

“... the Latin cultural toleration of prostitutes, thorough police and political corruption, weak laws and new shipping routes.’ East European Jews never monopolised transnational prostitution systems – far from it. But enough of them were in the right place at the right time for an explanation to be worth seeking. The first man through the revolving door ...”

“... easy way to complete the forms. The same applies to statistics from Egyptian asylums supplied by John Warnock, the head of the Lunacy Department there from 1895 to 1923. Warnock admitted to a ‘total ignorance of Arabic’, which must have made sensitive diagnosis difficult. He also diagnosed Egyptian nationalism as ‘an infectious mental disorder’ and ...”

“... good character, outside the confines of a job interview or a first meeting with prospective in-laws? Humblebragging in itself is, I suppose, innocuous, but much less so the sustained and coercive judgmentalism of social media.The work of the early 18th-century paradox-monger Bernard Mandeville supplies a devastating corrective to the fashion for unctuous ...”

“... traitor. When he questioned the jurisdiction of the specially assembled high court, its president, John Bradshawe, replied: ‘There is a contract and bargain made between the king and his people … The one tie, the one bond, is the bond of protection that is due from the sovereign. The other is the bond of subjection that is due from the subject. Sir, if ...”

“... political event – a symbol of colonial exploitation and neglect. In 1861 the radical nationalist John Mitchel published The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), in which he blamed the British government for the devastation. ‘The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight,’ he wrote, ‘but the English created the Famine … and a million and a half ...”

“... in the South-West don’t like what they’re seeing and in Arizona they have drafted state laws on illegal immigration that vex the federal courts and alienate the business community. Most worrying, they raise local tension between Hispanics and whites. Over the last ten years, beefed-up border control has led to many more deaths among ...”

“... large figure paintings (including Golgotha, a shtetl crucifixion, with the figures of Mary and St John based on his parents), one enthusiastic critic said it was ‘as if by mistake, the works of a child, truly fresh, “barbaric” and fantastic, had landed there.’ When his work was shown in Berlin two years later the response was even more ...”