“... shells on mountains, but the Flood was itself thought of in a variety of ways. Writing in 1695, John Woodward, an English physician and fossil collector, proposed that it resulted from a temporary suspension of gravity, during which all the materials of the Earth were churned up into a thick suspension. When gravity returned, the materials settled into the ...”

“... twice that number.) Humboldt’s goal was neither to manipulate the natural world nor to formulate laws about its operation; rather it was to capture that world with words and images, and thus make it legible and accessible to a broad public. For him, the library, not the laboratory, was the primary site of scientific production, and here too he belonged to a ...”

“... irresistibly lucid prose: it seems as if the decisive move was made before he put pen to paper. John Austin borrowed a phrase from Aristotle’s Poetics to describe this effect: ‘events outside the tragedy’. If we want to get off this stage, how are we to do it? The ladder seems to have been kicked away. The parallel argument current today hustles us ...”

“... in how to write about crime need look no further than Web of Corruption, which tells the story of John Poulson and T. Dan Smith. Raymond Fitzwalter and David Taylor took eight years to research and write their analysis of the most far-reaching corruption trial of this century. The opening summary is startling. Of those prosecuted in connection with Poulson ...”

“... for a hatchet, the Indians showed them a portage trail that led to a small rivulet, Bayou St John, that emptied into Lake Pontchartrain. The lake connected to the Gulf, and so would allow large ships to reach a city while avoiding the Mississippi altogether. The rivulet was surrounded by relatively high ground, and the area was close enough to the ...”

“... of; nothing to do with romantic ideals of Ireland; nothing to do with the Plantation, the Penal Laws, 1798, the Famine or the Rising. It was very simple: the state and its agents had acted brutally and wrongly, and should not be allowed to do so again. The atmosphere was fervid, there was endless talk, endless speculation and impossible ambitions. Soldiers ...”

“... phrase). By contrast, the 1840s were rich in significant events – from the repeal of the Corn Laws to revolution in France, from the Irish famine to the railway shares mania. It was a time when Army officers still obeyed the ‘Chrisless code’ of duelling, when judges sat drunk on the Bench after dinner and the Post Office opened anybody’s ...”

“... were also numberless worthy members of the public, who faced a stupefying barrage of emergency laws passed on sumptuary, economic and security grounds. Only the ‘unco guid’ on the Home Front saw the war through without breaking some regulation or other, consciously or otherwise, or taking advantage of an illegality by others. Donald Thomas’s book ...”

“... of succession, human frailty and faction. Cromwell, especially in drafting and masterminding the laws which made the Church of England autonomous and subject only to the king as its supreme head, established for all time to come the sovereignty of statute law, and therefore of Parliament, the maker of statutes (not forgetting that the king was a member of ...”

“... unregulated way. Among the things Basel III (or some other legislative regime) must do is bring in laws to control the use of derivatives. The first and most essential requirement is something that a complete outsider to the system notices within the first five minutes of having derivatives explained to him: it is that there is no central place where ...”

“... on foreign investment. They come to Moscow and work themselves ragged producing plans and laws and programmes which are, in effect, the basis of the new Russian order. They are all very careful not to claim anything more than an advisory role; and to be sure, the Government decides everything, with Gaidar meticulously checking every suggestion. Far ...”

“... illusion that Burke was the lackey of the rich and powerful. From first to last, he stuck up for John Wilkes and the cause of liberty. He drily recognised Wilkes’s failings: ‘There has been no hero of the mob but Wilkes’; ‘He is not ours, and if he were, is little to be trusted. He is a lively agreeable man, but of no prudence and no ...”

“... American colonists, ‘that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?’ John Stuart Mill credited India’s free-trading British overlords with benign liberal intentions towards a people self-evidently incapable of self-rule. ‘Despotism,’ he wrote, ‘is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end ...”

“... worth speculating about. What, for example, is the truth of the legend that James Mill entrusted John Stuart’s political education to Place? Mr Miles does not touch on it. The story told in Iain McCalman’s Radical Underground is told perforce from the outside. There are no personal records to give an inner logic and life to the careers of the early ...”

“... summoned. His lofty earlier debates on the Agony in the Garden and Cain and Abel with his friend John Colet would have remained unknown – Colet was not one to rush into print – if Erasmus had not written them up and got them into circulation. If Colet’s new St Paul’s School was known abroad, it was Erasmus’s doing. Even Jean Vitrier, coming to ...”