“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... electricity is cut, taxes remain uncollected, emergency calls go unheeded. Because apartheid laws and regulations were primarily designed to suppress and control, they have lost all legitimacy even where they potentially benefit the people. In a state of anomie, paralysed by the daily struggle to survive, the majority of the population waits to be ...”

“... could dismiss the police as their social inferiors. Nor did the Indians have to worry about pass laws or curfews or learning English or the thousand and one other handicaps that beset Africans. You would have needed to reverse the law of gravity for them not to have dominated the ANC. I never knew a Communist who didn’t believe that, though of course we ...”

“... guns is Ward Hill Lamon, who proves to be almost as formidable an adherent as Joab was to King David of Israel. There had been a plot to kill Lincoln at Baltimore: that is why the new President has ‘snuck in like some old chicken thief’ – to use the words of one of his enemies, the wretched Herold, a youth working in a chemist’s shop and hanging ...”

“... that a representation of a plum pudding cannot be eaten, that the fact there are no iron laws of history does not mean that we could slip back into feudalism next Wednesday. It is a sign of the portentous absurdity of so much Post-Modern thought that such glaringly self-evident positions need to be so loudly affirmed. And it is a mark of how much ...”

“... the government put de Kooning’s Woman III up for sale. It was sold to the American billionaire David Geffen, and the proceeds were used to buy pages of the Houghton Shahnameh, a particularly magnificent edition of the Persian Book of Kings, that had been taken apart and sold as single leaves by a collector in the 1970s. The purchase satisfied nobody. Some ...”

“... of prohibited drugs bear responsibility in each country along the route, as do the dysfunctional laws that push the trade into a violent underground. The migrant children, she writes, are more accurately described as refugees of a hemispheric war. The children’s problems follow them to the United States. Luiselli tells the story of Manu, the first child ...”

“... as 1935 there was hope that the Jewish body – now clearly labelled as Jewish by the Nuremberg Laws – might still be transcended, that my father’s optimism was not entirely phantasmal. Form U146 – dated 19 September 1935 – admits him to stand before the examining body for medicine at the University of Hamburg and present his credentials. The second ...”

“... years to get them into a form with which he was satisfied. His principal discoveries – the three laws of motion and the explanation of gravity and planetary motion in terms of universal attraction – were simple and elegant and easy to understand, and one of his early drafts was written methodo populari, as he put it, to ensure that it ‘could be widely ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of having a thin conception of society – unless by society we mean social democracy rather than laws, schools, churches, families and firms. As Rodgers points out, even Hayek’s most influential student, Margaret Thatcher, when she stated that ‘there is no such thing as society,’ added a rider regarding the irreducibly social and institutional nature ...”

“... Fleming’s history is Volume II in the Penguin History of Britain, for which the general editor, David Cannadine, ‘laid down three inviolable rules’: no footnotes, no historiography (that is, no discussion of the ebb and flow of historical opinion), and make it accessible to everyone, general readers, students and professional historians alike (in other ...”

“... imposing so-called civilisation on others. ‘I used to think that the people who created these laws that effectively suspended the rule of law were moral barbarians. Now I know they were just pioneers, ahead of their time.’ There is plenty more of this quietly savage tone in Diary of a Bad Year, and lots about the facility at Guantánamo Bay and ...”

“... are not variable confessions but different worlds, and different instruments of understanding. David Kepesh in The Dying Animal offers a strong sidelight on Roth in The Plot against America, a comic view of liberty and nation which darkens and widens in the new novel. Kepesh, divorced and determined never to make the mistake of marriage again, takes true ...”