“... territory, but with another curious turn. For this strange emotion – what Douglas Adams might have called ‘the long toothache of the soul’ – isn’t a late 20th-century Hollywood add-on, but Tolkien himself, through and through. He theorised it in his 1938 lecture ‘On Fairy-Stories’ as ‘a fleeting glimpse of Joy beyond the ...”

“... than the crime itself . . . and adds a second defilement to the first’. Justice William Douglas came close. He saw Furman’s conviction as invalid because it was ‘pregnant with discrimination’ and because, more generally, a sort of moral evolution had brought society to a point where the death penalty – like branding, torture and public ...”

“... that, with his sense of history, he means the Lloyd George who was the patron of Field Marshal Douglas Haig, and the guarded admirer of Hitler, just as much as he means the Lloyd George who was the father of Welsh Disestablishment. And one must suppose that he comprehends FDR the originator of the war economy, and FDR the prime mover of American ...”