“... families. This budget helps hardworking people keep more of the money they have earned. His boss, David Cameron, criticising Labour in Parliament last month: They met with a bunch of migrants in Calais, they said they could all come to Britain. The only people they never stand up for are the British people and hardworking taxpayers. The former Conservative ...”

“... intellectual and emotional energy, when he left Ireland and pursued a career in England. As David Bromwich has already pointed out, there is an English Burke whom O’Brien never makes known to his readers. He understands, and can excitingly depict, the oratory and politics of Burke’s House of Commons; but since he is intent on arguing that the ghosts ...”

“... from a group of people, a remarkable chorus, club or consensus composed of Robert Burns, David Hume and Henry Cockburn, while the nearby estate of Auchinleck, mentioned in an additional stanza contained in one version of the poem, was called ‘romantic’ by a son of the house, James Boswell. Kyle counts, then, as a highly romantic vicinity. But it ...”

“... end of the decade rare ‘class’ was being shown by such public-school amateurs as Peter May and David Sheppard. In 1949, such was the craze for sport, 90,000 people turned up to watch the FA Amateur Cup Final. As Anthony Bailey, who watched Portsmouth when they won the League Championship two years running, fondly remembers, ‘football shorts were long and ...”

“... been assassinated in Havana. When he didn’t hear, he calmly betrayed the mercenary force as the laws of realpolitik required of him. He forgot to confide in Arthur Schlesinger, but Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, in their authoritative ‘One Hell of a Gamble’, also state plainly that ‘the Kennedy Administration had expected Castro to die before ...”

“... a rough conception of ourselves as organisms causally embedded in the world whose constituents and laws we are trying to discover; so how things seem from our perceptual point of view clearly provides data for such an investigation. However, in the moral case we do not take our evaluative intuitions to be the result of causal interaction with the moral ...”

“... not draw attention to itself and that it should work in optimal co-operation with nature, with the laws governing the ebb and flow of biological energy. A technique called ‘range of intensity limitation’ flattens the music out to make it unnoticeable, ‘like wind playing between the leaves of trees’ (Joe Coco, Muzak engineer for more than forty ...”

“... Psychoanalysis is a human science that courts its own ruin, but won’t abandon its quest for laws. ‘Freud’s vision of the conscious mind perched precariously and parasitically on the outer surface of an implacable unconscious had its grandeur,’ Malcolm Bowie writes in his introduction to An Outline of Psychoanalysis. ‘But the disproportion ...”

“... science appeared to offer a way to rehabilitate the nation’s exceptionalist destiny by revealing laws of liberal progress that operated beneath the ethnic chaos of American society. Mead was born in Philadelphia in 1901. Her father was a progressive economics professor at the Wharton School, her mother a feminist sociologist who studied Italian ...”

“... and other pre-emptive acts of violence. Another neo-con, the New York Times columnist David Brooks, recently blasted the CIA’s ‘bloodless compilations of data by anonymous technicians’ and praised those analysts who make ‘novelistic judgments’ informed by ‘history, literature, philosophy and theology’. Rumsfeld’s war on the ...”

“... they cared about this least of all, made the US into World Bully, breaking no obvious American laws as they did so (the Valerie Plame case excluded). All this, until recently, with popular assent and elite approval.Edmund Wilson in Patriotic Gore, his book about America’s Civil War and about an American obsession with war, said of the literature on this ...”

“... Dante, Boccaccio, More, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, Bayle, Voltaire, Sterne, Diderot, David, Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Warburg, Proust, Kracauer, Picasso and many more, each an extraordinary display of learning. No other living historian approaches the range of this erudition. Every page of Threads and Traces, his latest work to appear in ...”

“... his 35 years at Netherne. This led me, some months later, to an office in Lambeth belonging to David O’Flynn, a consultant psychiatrist at the Lambeth and Maudsley Hospitals, and chair of the Adamson Collection Trust. We walked up and down the corridors of the clinic where he worked and looked at the display of patients’ pictures on the walls (these ...”

“... basic humanitarian values which can come into conflict, and sometimes contradiction, with national laws. As I learned repeatedly in a recent stint of reporting in Russia, this is anathema to those who, like the Russians, cling to the Westphalian model of the sovereign nation state as protection against the depredations of Nato, now the only force able to ...”

“... well. Sometimes things that I didn’t understand Charlie would explain to me: the harsh ways and laws of the life [in Paddington], such as the things people were respected and despised for.’ He and his friends were ‘always fighting and shouting … I heard this clinking in his jacket; it was a knuckleduster and I took it out; next day he came back with ...”