“... or that its history mirrors that of Jewish migrations, is a trope of modern antisemitism. As David Nirenberg put it in Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (2013), the association of Judaism with worldliness and money is ‘as ancient as Christianity itself’. Between the 15th and 18th centuries, the period covered by Bethencourt, European long-distance ...”

“... is nothing equivalent to public school for boys – these fine traditions – unwritten laws that turn out so many splendid characters have been withheld from them – to their detriment.’ The most splendid character of all, in her eyes, was Roland Leighton, who had carried off the school’s seven chief prizes (‘most glorious books in the ...”

“... are allowed to go to Lebanese universities, but these are expensive, and Lebanon’s draconian laws against Palestinians taking good jobs prevent them making enough money to afford to go to one. As so often before, I am struck in Beirut and Jerusalem by the gulf between the high ability of British diplomats and the fumbling policies they are compelled to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in 2012 that a donation of £200,000 could secure what he called ‘premier league’ access to David Cameron and George Osborne.But the Channel 4 investigation, carried out by journalists from the not-for-profit outfit Verbatim, felt more significant. Here was the leader of a major party, Nigel Farage, declaring ‘It worked, boom!’ when told that a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”