“... More’s praise of the first two Tudors could hardly have been more perfunctory. To More the best form of government was an aristocracy, not a monarchy. His preference was shared by Thomas Starkey, whose Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, dated too late by Mayer’s predecessors, is placed by his careful scholarship around 1529-32. Time and again the ...”

“... of civilisation – one has only to scratch them to lay bare the wolf-skin underneath,’ and the best solution would be a universal bloodbath, after which the oppressors will find it is a bit late to be sorry ‘they left the hordes in that state of ignorance and savagery they enjoy today.’ Sardism gave way to the more positive and universal creed of ...”

“... government, is the effect on developing and transitional economies of wooing away their best and brightest in such a massive, multilateral brain drain. Beyond that, the flurry of efforts to draw skilled labour into the dominant industrial sector seems to point to the globalisation of labour, or at least the beginnings of it; to the development of a ...”

“... crimes no matter where or by whom or against whom they were committed. It afforded probably the best legal foundation for Israel’s trial of Eichmann. But universal jurisdiction under customary international law tends to be marginalised in modern state practice by the incorporation of treaties either by automatic constitutional assimilation, as in the ...”

“... not always with positive results: between the wars, Bermondsey council had developed some of the best health services in the country, funded by higher rates, but was forced to reduce them once it became clear they were no longer affordable in a standardised national system. As the century wore on, local authorities were reduced to mere agents of the central ...”

“... than this, and much has indeed been said in the collection of papers edited by David Morgan and Geoffrey Stephenson under the title Suspicion and Silence.* But since my disagreement with the Lord Chief Justice is on record in Hansard, I leave it there for now. The second topic, which connects to the first through the notion of fairness in how evidence is ...”

“... to the nation if it is what eventually leads to its timely collapse. The resignations are the best-publicised outgrowth of governmental decay. The litany of names reads like the cast-list of some bizarre Antipodean soap: Allan Stewart, wielder of the pick-axe; Michael Mates, sender of the famous watch; Norman Lamont, evictor (with some help from the ...”

“... and political figures of the 19th century. His Dostoyevski (1931) is often claimed to be his best book, though I do not think that he himself liked it very much (he preferred his Bakunin). It was a wonderfully concise account of the life, and it combined psychological penetration with a capacity for irony: Ostrovsky, for instance, ‘was addicted to that ...”

“... to attayne good learning.’ But he could do little to shake the general assumption that ‘the best Scholemaster of our time, was the greatest beater.’ As a grammar school pupil and (if Aubrey is to be believed) a sometime teacher himself, Shakespeare must have been familiar with both sides of this disciplinary regime; and his references to ...”

“... they produced (see below), each unit is represented by a red dot; the position of the dot is the best estimate of the mortality rate; the bars through the dot mark the 95 per cent confidence interval: if the data are accurate and the method unbiased, 95 per cent of the time the true rate will be somewhere in this range. Hospital units are arranged in order ...”

“... to discover truth is restricted to a few, and to endure it exhibited by scarcely more. The best regime will therefore reflect differences in human excellence, and be led by an appropriate élite. But although the highest virtue is philosophical contemplation of the truth, this does not mean – contrary to a superficial reading of the Republic – that ...”

“... who knows what would have happened? But it wouldn’t have been that. Moore’s​ account works best when the bubble is the story. The most dramatic chapter by far is the one that describes how the Thatcher government managed to tie its fate to the poll tax, a misjudgment of mind-bending proportions. Like all the ...”

“... Children, wrote to Enid Blyton to ask whether she would be willing to be interviewed about the best holiday she could remember. ‘Dear Mr Gamlin,’ Blyton wrote the next day. ‘Thank you for your nice letter. It all sounds very interesting but I ought to warn you of something you obviously don’t know, but which has been well known in the literary and ...”

“... Prize? And are the science fiction stories H.P. Lovecraft ghosted for Harry Houdini not the best things he ever wrote? There would be a touch of all this in the strange case of Assange. But there is something else about the genre, a sense that the world might be more ghosted now than at any time in history. Isn’t Wikipedia entirely ghosted? Isn’t ...”

“... Ellen but Nellie, a name-form that peaked in the 1880s and 1890s. Orthography became important: Geoffrey or Jeffrey, Ann or Anne, Stephen or Steven. Girls’ names were especially given to whim and proliferation. In the 1930s, my mother was christened Doreen because a Russian acquaintance of my grandfather said that was the name of the nicest girl he had ...”