“... Mary de Rachewiltz (Pound’s daughter by the American violinist Olga Rudge), and Joanna and David Moody (who is at work on a multi-volume biography of Pound) have chosen to include every message from the poet to his parents in its entirety, however mundane. I suppose one might pause to note from the above the extent to which Pound was open to sharing ...”

“... and Astronautics, who has come up with 52, one for each week of the year. Augustine’s Laws uses its axioms to mock bureaucratic routine, state regulation of economic activity, administratively defined corporate policy and spurious expertise. Law Number XXXI: ‘The optimum committee has no members.’ Law Number MLVII: ‘Two-thirds of the ...”

“... weight was crushing even for the very finest of its mandarins. The senior Foreign Office official, David Gore-Booth, agreed that answers ‘should be accurate’ but thought that ‘half a picture can be accurate.’ Similarly, the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robin Butler, thought that it was ‘acceptable in some circumstances for a statement to disclose only part ...”

“... he himself developed in the 1990s, and when we met, he took me back to the repeal of the Corn Laws in the 1840s: a good example, he believes, of trading interests driving down domestic food production. Lang is not opposed to trade; it’s just that on the religion of the markets he is agnostic and feels this is becoming a respectable position: whatever ...”

“... portrait, albeit of a distinctively colonial character and quality. Last year, the art historian David Bindman, who has studied the picture closely for thirty years, proposed that it is in fact a self-portrait, painted by Williams himself.What is the intent of the image and what is created by its beholders? The problem of Francis Williams’s portrait shows ...”

“... life of the criminal was forfeited – ‘sacrificed’ was the 18th-century term – ‘to the laws of his country’, which enshrined the sanctity of property, or of a man’s home, or of paper money or of normative sexuality. These were worth someone dying for and a number of thieves, burglars, forgers, sodomites and rapists were hanged because, it was ...”

“... mentioned by Nicholas Rowe in 1709) adds force. The book opens with a brisk pair of essays by David Fallow and Michael Wood on the subject of his parents: John Shakespeare, born in about 1530, the son of a tenant farmer in the outlying village of Snitterfield, and Mary née Arden, some years younger, of a more prosperous family from Wilmcote. Neither of ...”

“... no sustained narratives of disease. Autobiographies in the shadow of death were rare and brief. In David Hume’s six-page-long account of his life there are four sentences about his impending end: ‘I was struck with a disorder in my bowels which at first gave me no alarm, but has since, as I apprehend it, become mortal and incurable. I now reckon upon a ...”

“... of ‘the delicious surplus of life’. Lamb’s own definition is thata pun is not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit. It is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect. It is an antic which does not stand upon manners, but comes bounding into the presence, and does not show the less comic for being dragged in sometimes by the ...”

“... associated. The purge of 1519, for instance, which has so engrossed Gwyn’s bête noire David Starkey, was ‘a storm in a tea-cup’. The truth, pronounces Gwyn, is that the political world of Wolsey’s ascendancy was ‘not an environment where faction flourished’. It was nevertheless an environment where the Duke of Buckingham got his head ...”

“... relations. The result would of course be a state-nation, a country defined by its institutions and laws rather than by its ethnos or imagined kinship. The only nationalism it can lay claim to will have a civic character, and political history must take the place of common descent or language. Time alone will turn such history into something like instinct, the ...”

“... available, well-used moulds. One of these turned up, somewhat oddly, in the New Statesman, where David Selbourne argued that what had been persistently overlooked was the fact that India wasn’t a country at all, but a sub-continent. This thesis has some truth in it, but there hangs about it an ancient and fish-like smell. It was, after all, a standard ...”

“... would betray confusion to deny that a legal system was valid because one thought that many of the laws in it were bad. On a parallel analysis of morality, two adherents of the same adequate moral system could disagree about its implications in a particular case, but this would be a real disagreement and it would not be possible for contradictory assertions to ...”

“... were insights in Wallace’s treatment of divergence which Darwin could turn to advantage. As David Kohn observed in a cogent dismissal of Brackman2, it is first necessary to distinguish between divergence as a purely taxonomic conception and divergence as an explanatory principle, integral to the dynamics of natural selection. Both Darwin and Wallace ...”

“... this in spite of a solemn pledge taken at a conference in Wembley to fight the Thatcher employment laws. From then on, Routledge argues, it was clear that the TUC – and thus the bulk of its affiliated unions – was a paper tiger. That is true as far as it goes. Equally important, however, is the fact that at Wembley and elsewhere, the TUC constantly pledged ...”