“... adopted it in a decorous shape for his longest and most ambitious work, The Moralists. David Hume, whom Diderot befriended in Paris in the 1760s, used it to scandalously sceptical effect in his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, unpublishable until after his death. Diderot’s most famous work is a dialogue: Rameau’s Nephew, in which a ...”

“... more than two million West Bankers and 1.3 million Gazans – is subject to different laws; the last two face stringent restrictions on their movements. A further five million Palestinians (there are no reliable figures) live outside Palestine, some of them in the utter misery of the refugee camps in Lebanon, others in widely differing conditions ...”

“... broke in a stable of headstrong, ‘hyperindividualist’ contributors, including the young Henry David Thoreau, spending countless hours working on their ‘sublimo-slipshod’ submissions.Capper’s second volume, subtitled ‘The Public Years’, begins with a passage from Fuller’s private journal, written on the eve of the Dial’s first publication and ...”

“... The old way of running schools was that one big hub – central government – sent out money and laws and regulations to 152 smaller hubs, the local authorities, who then passed them on to clusters of little cogs, the schools. It was all fairly orderly. The new system, on the other hand, is chaotic. Central government throws out cash and ...”

“... side’s backers holding the tap on Hong Kong’s daily water supply. Two harsh-looking Hong Kong laws, the Public Order Ordinance and the Societies Ordinance, forbade unauthorised demonstrations or ‘foreign political organisations or bodies from conducting political activities in the Region’, ‘foreign’ discreetly left undefined. The actual solution ...”

“... Menachem Begin as Israel’s prime minister. Begin, who had organised the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in which 91 people were killed, was the first of the frank exponents of Jewish supremacism who continue to rule Israel. He was also the first routinely to invoke Hitler and the Holocaust and the Bible while assaulting Arabs and building ...”

“... they left almost half a century ago? Israeli historians like Benny Morris, Israeli authors like David Grossman and Amos Oz, have written eloquently of their catastrophe. But in 1950, the Israeli government passed the Absentee Property Law which still forbids Selma Tawil and the other 750,000 Palestinians from ever returning – if they left their homes in ...”

“... as William Empson did in the introduction to the selection of Coleridge’s poems he edited with David Pirie: ‘Coleridge wrote only a few very good poems.’ Debate has turned essentially on the question of which those poems were. Defending the edition he was by then at work on, Mays outlined in a 1996 lecture what he meant by his title, ‘Coleridge’s ...”

“... years later that Montagu was a man whose conduct is ‘little governed by the universally admitted laws of Friendship and regulations of society’. ‘Tempting region that,’ the Prelude added, For Zeal to enter and refresh herself, Where passions had the privilege to work, And never hear the sound of their own names. I am not trying to cast Montagu for a ...”

“... Casement staying at the Hotel Le Cosmopolite, but he did not, in fact, stay there. He stayed with David Cazes, but to know that you would have to have had access to Casement’s letters, which the potential forger did not have. In the White Diaries, Casement used the term ‘police news’ to mean the dossier he carried from England about perpetrators of ...”

“... to touch the ground, as one meeting followed another in Berlin, Paris, Moscow, Washington, Camp David and Ottawa. As Sarotte says, the tempo was at times ‘unimaginable’. At the Ottawa conference in February 1990, which was supposed to be about aviation, Baker ‘managed in just one day … to speak at least five times each to both Genscher and ...”

“... response. The same appropriation, however laced with self-criticism, continues through novels like David Leavitt’s While England Sleeps and films like Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom. Franco’s rule had the effect of marginalising the country culturally, in a sort of mutual boycott punctuated by skirmishes and scandal (Buñuel, for instance, tentatively ...”

“... strains and propagate from the better specimens: if humans were subject to the same evolutionary laws, why not do this with them? Darwin’s half-cousin Francis Galton had created something of a splash in 1869 with his Hereditary Genius, purporting to correlate high achievement with particular bloodlines. In work by others inspired by Galton’s example, the ...”

“... his point is simply that if we fix the price distortions caused by externalities, we can be as David to Goliath without really changing anything. Probably.Credit where it’s due: Nordhaus was one of the first among his peers to name the climate colossus. It has taken more than forty years for the rest of the business community, and the elite economists ...”

“... the victorious Sistani faction seems relatively certain to implement traditional Shia property laws, which would limit women’s inheritance to half that of men. In Maysan, the winning Sadr-backed party is not only in favour of requiring women to wear headscarves and banning the public sale of alcohol (neither is part of the social practices of the ...”