“... into a unified theory, that Hume rightly treats particular causal statements as entailing causal laws, and that causal relations hold between events. I subscribe to most of these theses, though not to all of them. I think that the authors are right in treating Hume’s definitions of cause as complementary rather than inconsistent. They are right also, in my ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... rights. For many, the coronation oath was the guarantee of this mutually beneficial relationship. John Rastell, a legal publisher, wrote in 1527 that the monarch ‘shall grant to hold the laws and customs of the realm and to his power keep them and affirm them, which the folk and people have made and chosen’.As a result ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for murder or manslaughter, the police always vindicated. This isn’t simply against the laws of England; it’s against a more fundamental law – the law of averages. 16 April, Yorkshire. En route home and with half an hour to spare we stop briefly at Kirkstall Abbey, which R. has never seen. After Fountains, Byland and Rievaulx, Kirkstall is a bit ...”

“... make all the ballads,’ Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun wrote, ‘he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ But nationality still mattered: Seamus Heaney’s reaction to his inclusion in Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s 1982 Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry was ‘My passport’s green.’ Heaney, preoccupied with ‘the government ...”

“... attended in Dobbs Ferry, about an hour’s drive up the Hudson from New York City. Her father, John Cheever, drove her to the school. ‘Joey!’ Cummings shouted when he spotted Cheever, whom he’d first met in the 1930s (‘Joey’ was Cheever’s boyhood nickname). Cheever remembered that first meeting: Cummings’s ‘last book of poetry had been ...”

“... have been bluffing when he wrote in 1702 that there remained ‘sufficient authoritys given by the Laws in being for suppressing’ seditious print. But new patches were being stitched onto the quilt. Anne’s reign started with a royal proclamation ‘for Restraining the Spreading of False News, and Printing and Publishing of Irreligious and Seditious Papers ...”

“... arranged,’ Virginia Woolf wrote, disparaging the kind of fiction associated with Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy and H.G. Wells. It’s a proposition that might appeal to Simon Okotie. But before deciding whether it has merit he would want to see whether an apparently symmetrical arrangement of gig-lamps might not, on close examination, prove ever so ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... riding a goat cart in Central Park’ before going off to Harvard, where his classmates included John Reed, T.S. Eliot and Conrad Aiken. From birth to death, Fortune – in the form of knowing nearly everyone who counted and being able to defend at least two sides of every major public issue of his time – always favoured him. The list of his friends, his ...”

“... of the Burgos junta did. They rested their case on the Indians’ own nature. They began from John Mair, a Scot at the Collège de Montaigu in Paris, who had himself begun from Aristotle. Arguing against the more cautious theologians that Christian doctrine could not be at odds with the ‘true philosophy’, even if that philosophy had been proposed by a ...”

“... of the ruling class, and that at bottom it was one law for the rich and another for the poor; ‘Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law,’ ran Oliver Goldsmith’s lapidary line. But the functioning of the law, Thompson stressed, necessarily involved negotiated compromises: because it needed legitimacy, it had to possess a power not primarily ...”