“... aberration, England’s sole experience of open military rule since the Conquest. Their powers, David Hume ruled, were exercised ‘not in the legal manner of European nations, but according to the maxims of eastern tyranny’. Nineteenth-century Whiggish historians queued to condemn that ‘despotism’. That the sword reigned in Cromwellian England is ...”

“... as developed in the Tractatus. Since mathematics is essential to the formulation of physical laws, the logical positivists also leaned heavily on Bertrand Russell’s programme to reduce all mathematical concepts and truths to those of pure logic (a programme that was later recognised to have failed). Goldstein bases her story of the development of the ...”

“... When the last federal soldiers left the South in 1877, Southern legislatures passed a series of laws that mandated segregation in public facilities (housing, schools, restaurants, drinking fountains and bathrooms), and banned interracial marriage. White tyranny was also enforced by a sharecropping system that kept black farmers tied to the land; a ‘poll ...”

“... the way banking has changed, become more intense, more time-consuming and more overtly greedy. David Kynaston, author of a magisterial four-volume history of the City, completed in 2001, observes at the start of the fourth volume that ‘the modern City is in many ways a cruel, heartless place, and its occupants work such cripplingly long hours that ...”

“... simplistic Pac-Man-style games of yesteryear) involve richly imagined worlds with their own hidden laws. To navigate such worlds, one must constantly frame and test hypotheses about their underlying logic. This is hardly a pastime that promotes mental flightiness. ‘The average video game takes about 40 hours to play,’ Johnson writes, ‘the complexity of ...”

“... the efforts of kindly Tommies in winning hearts and minds. Recent studies – for instance, David French’s excellent The British Way in Counter-Insurgency 1945-67 – show that in Malaya, Cyprus, Aden and Kenya British soldiers in fact displayed frequent brutality, often condoned by their officers. In all of Britain’s counterinsurgency ...”

“... official lamp-standard, selling good design to industry and editing the high street with planning laws. Decisions about taste, if they are not made by the makers, are made by the choosers. And to choose you have to have something to choose from. In the years between the wars a number of loose, frequently overlapping groups of taste-makers and form-givers made ...”

“... 1977. In that year, two contributors to a Times Literary Supplement survey, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil, spoke so highly of her work as to effect a change in this situation. Three more novels by Barbara Pym were published, this time by Macmillan, who finally added to them in 1982 – two years after the writer had herself died – the book originally ...”

“... involvement in Britain’s 5G network, and the bombardiers of Brexit – Iain Duncan Smith, David Davis, Liam Fox et al – are furious too. The industry points out that Huawei kit has already been installed in dozens of cities across the UK and to a more sophisticated standard than the US can currently provide. Ripping it all out would cost billions ...”

“... Nancy Mitford two years later to distinguish between U and non-U. From across the Atlantic came David Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd, which taught us to separate modern man into the two camps of the inner directed and the other-directed. This way of observing the world suggested that there were no natural laws, that nothing ...”

“... is reproduced on the dust-jacket of Marvell and Liberty, a collection of essays which, like David Norbrook’s recent Writing the English Republic, chimes with the discontent that a significant percentage of British people now feels about the monarchy. That sense of friendship, of a shared and living republican culture, is present in Melville’s many ...”

“... it, this is not a two-point plan. Sullivan spells out the small print: ‘an end to sodomy laws ... recourse to the courts if there is not equal protection of heterosexuals and homosexuals in law enforcement ... an equal legal age of consent ... inclusion of the facts about homosexuality in the curriculum of every government-funded school’, and ...”

“... regime in which black and brown bodies could be seized, broken and destroyed outside all norms and laws of war – are coming to grips with ‘America’s Original Sin: Slavery and the Legacy of White Supremacy’ (an unlikely recent headline in Foreign Affairs). Back in the early 2000s the liberal universalists seemed unaware that their project might be ...”

“... Duffy calls ‘famous, fatuous, but fatally quotable’. Among the living, Duffy takes issue with David Loades, the biographer of Mary who, while he has modified his earlier views on the ineffectiveness of the Marian bishops and their campaign, still believes (in Duffy’s account of his position) that they did ‘too little, too late’ to restore England to ...”

“... up to the death of George VI, and keeping all four of the brothers as well as their wives and in-laws in her sights, she manages to convey the way the much rehearsed events unfolded through quirks of circumstance and individual temperament. With the death of George V in 1936 the Victorian age finally came to an end. John Betjeman’s poem, published the ...”