“... 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 ...”

“... stations; limiting voting hours; harassing and threatening would-be voters; introducing voter-ID laws such as the Crosscheck programme, which made it a lot harder for people of colour to register to vote. Or because of the FBI’s intervention in the election; or because of years of negative media coverage; or because of foreign intervention designed to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... atolls had contributed to a widespread scepticism about the bomb. In 1984, the new prime minister, David Lange, announced that he would make the country a nuclear-free zone – a policy hated by the US but popular, then as now, in New Zealand. When New Zealand began to refuse permission for nuclear-powered ships to enter its ports, the US suspended New Zealand ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and synthetic fibres as well as cars. Plentiful cheap labour, corporatist employment laws and close relations between banks, suppliers and producers meant that economic policies had rapid effects. Centralised industrial planning encouraged the standardisation and automation of production as well as innovations in logistics. From the 1970s until ...”

“... 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 ...”