“... it was Chamberlain, breaking with old orthodoxies, who sought to achieve through tariff reform Sir John Seeley’s vision of a Greater Britain equipped for the struggles of the 20th century. Many efforts have been made to interpret Chamberlain and the great U-turn he performed in mid-career. Inevitably, the supporters of Mr Gladstone regarded him as a traitor ...”

“... Scott have done more for the preservation of proper Scotland than could ever be accomplished by laws, statesmen or associations,’ wrote Henry Cockburn. After Scott’s death, the most significant literary figure in Edinburgh was not a Scotsman, but the reclusive Thomas de Quincey. Mr Royle treats him to a passing tip of the hat while he evokes the great ...”

“... and preached rarely. Much of the work of conversion seems to have been done by a schoolmaster, John Leeche, who conducted house hold worship with larger audiences than the vicar. After courting martyrdom for six years, Leeche was just about to be condemned by the Assizes for teaching without licence when the Privy Council sent him a recusant boy caught on ...”

“... film also glosses over the fact that Dworkin’s life partner of more than thirty years, John Stoltenberg, was and remains an openly gay man – so it ends up suggesting, inadvertently, that Dworkin made some sort of peace with heterosexuality.) We see and hear Dworkin describing these assaults and the significance they had for her, and watch as they ...”

“... picked up by law enforcement agencies around the world as the authorities struggled to modernise laws and investigative techniques designed to deal with old-fashioned varieties of organised crime. Glenny covered the Balkans during the collapse of the Soviet Union, and wrote three ambitious histories of the region. His fourth book, McMafia, examined how the ...”

“... year. These new clients are people who, ‘like the rest of us’, as one of their volunteers, John Monaghan, says, ‘were living on 110 per cent of their salaries’; this year, something in the working situation has changed, and they cannot manage their usual debts, mortgage, car, credit card. Monaghan is also worried about the effect of the recent ...”

“... especially in Brenner’s work, according to which history is not driven by the transhistorical laws of technological progress, and historical evidence does not support the contention that each social form must be succeeded by a more productive one. This interpretation does not deny that there have been great advances in technology in various times and ...”

“... its oil resources. The three principal Democratic candidates – Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards – have already hedged their bets, refusing to promise that, if elected, they would remove American forces from Iraq before 2013, the end of their first term. Among the winners: oil-services companies like Halliburton; the oil companies themselves ...”

“... on their way to becoming a distinct American people has a good pedigree, including J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, the source of all but one of Butler’s epigraphs. Crèvecoeur’s famous question was: ‘What then is this new man the American?’ His immediate answer – ‘that strange mixture of blood, which you ...”

“... the second part of a quasi-autobiographical trilogy, we are told that the book’s protagonist, John, ‘can see no reason why people need to dance’: Dancing makes sense only when it is interpreted as something else, something that people prefer not to admit. That something else is the real thing: the dance is merely a cover. Inviting a girl to dance ...”

“... the dream of an Eden on earth. Yet this idyllic vision led to bloody tyranny in Münster, where John of Leiden massacred his friends and partisans before being put to death himself. Bosch​ displays a deep acquaintance with alchemy, witchcraft, Hebraism, gnosticism, hallucinogenic mushrooms and popular folklore. His paintings are replete with graphic ...”

“... a redistricting map that sews up the outcome of a congressional election. In 2019, Chief Justice John Roberts declared that although the Supreme Court ‘does not condone excessive partisan gerrymandering’, any court-mandated intervention in district maps would inevitably look partisan and impugn the court’s neutrality. In 2017, during arguments in a ...”

“... route-miles fenced off from the rest of the country and ruled by their own mysterious rhythms and laws’, but you seldom hear ‘I love the railways,’ or ‘I hate the railways.’ What you might hear is ‘My husband’s obsessed with trains,’ or ‘My commute’s a nightmare,’ reflecting the two ways we do talk about the railways. For a minority, the ...”

“... the camaraderie of the laboratory, for there is no experimental work. Which is why the career of John von Neumann, who did do new work, and is the nearest thing the book has to a hero, is not typical. When he wanted to build a computer at the Institute he met resistance: Harold Cherniss, a specialist in ancient Greek philosophy, became an Institute ...”

“... defender of a view that, in its logical structure and basic values, adheres to the tradition of John Stuart Mill. Raz believes that liberal institutions are justified because, for those civilisations capable of sustaining them, they provide the best way of promoting human well-being: their value, in other words, is instrumental. The argument depends both on ...”