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“... 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 ...”

“... what their Aeschylus imagined our nursery children feel’ – that is, ‘the defects of natural laws’. In The Mayor of Casterbridge, Hardy declares that Michael Henchard has been brought down by ‘the ingenious machinery contrived by the gods for reducing human possibilities of amelioration to a minimum’. Much of Hardy’s mature writing can be seen as ...”

“... possessed a philosophy of its own. This was the materialist dialectic which revealed some general laws permeating both the natural and the social world, such as the famous ‘law of the transformation of quantity into quality’. Lenin, Kautsky and a host of successors went further. Either they felt that Marxism’s status as science had to be philosophically ...”

“... one or two good anecdotes, to illustrate his points. There is the tale of Hazlitt’s fight with John Lamb, in the course of a dispute about Holbein and Vandyke. I will quote the version in Benjamin Haydon’s journal: ‘They both became so irritated, they upset the card-table, and seized each other by the throat. In the struggle that ensued, Hazlitt got a ...”

“... John Sturrock’s little book is the best single guide to its subject that has yet appeared. Structuralism and Since demands, though, that its title be taken literally. It traces, technically and without concession to idle curiosity, the course of ‘structuralism’ in its modern phase – from the moment when it achieved new importance in the work of Lévi-Strauss in the early Sixties, through its development and extensions in the work of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, to its present position, which is known either as ‘post-structuralism’ or simply as ‘deconstruction ...”

“... also provoke a degree of puzzlement, as much on the right as on the left. In The Right Nation, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, two centre-right journalists who work on the Economist, ask why only 54 per cent of voters earning over $100,000 a year voted for Bush in 2000. Why does the party of big business, deregulation and tax-cutting engender less ...”

“... Administration. The great cult film of all time in this respect is George Axelrod’s and John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate, withdrawn from circulation after the Kennedy assassination but now available again in cassette form. And the great artistic and emblematic coincidence of the movie is the playing of the good guy by Frank Sinatra ...”

“... in Richards’s work especially, even if “principles” sounded more modest and practicable than laws, methods, etc.’Hartman gives no evidence at all that Leavis was refusing to acknowledge something. Indeed, since Hartman refuses to acknowledge that there are such things as principles and that they differ from theory (and not just from ‘...”

“... a quivering graduate student at Oxford in 1973, fresh from the Northern provinces, I sat for the John Locke Prize, a voluntary two-day examination for Oxford postgraduates in philosophy. As I had hitherto been a psychology student at Manchester, I thought this would be good practice for my upcoming B.Phil. philosophy exams. It was quite an ordeal (I nearly ...”

“... The day will come, and perhaps it is not far off, when John Locke will be universally placed among those writers who have perpetrated the most evil among men.’ If Locke has a competitor in this, it is David Hume, ‘the most culpable of these fatal writers who will not cease to damn the [18th] century in the eyes of posterity, the one who has used the most talent with the most composure to produce the most evil ...”

“... to evoke, in unforgettable detail, a moment of seismic historical change. Like the German painter, John Hale has produced a vast and enthralling mosaic. In his new cultural history of Renaissance Europe a sprawling mass of individual scenes, deftly drawn and coloured, capture the pain and the beauty of massive social and cultural change. As with ...”

“... nations, of occupancy of land that was, in the words of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, otherwise ‘desert and uncultivated’. Did that mean, countered Gipps, that the whole vast continent had come into the possession of Captain Arthur Phillip and his band of convicts and settlers – a few hundred in all – when they stepped ...”

“... The​ evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith believed that his former supervisor J.B.S. Haldane ‘wasn’t an ordinary mortal’. Haldane moved between the fields of physiology, biochemistry, genetics and evolutionary biology, making contributions to each that would ‘satisfy half a dozen ordinary mortals’, and also wrote scientific articles and books aimed at non-specialists ...”

“... and was charged with deep meaning by many prelates and intellectuals. At Vatican II, John XXIII himself dwelt lovingly on the universality, antiquity and majesty of the Latin language, which Providence – so he argued – had led the Church to adopt. Catholics, then, were bombarded every Sunday with a form of Latin that came to be, in some ...”