“... some argued that Africans were naturally inferior to whites, planters feared they would lose their powers to enslave when their workers became Christians. If African slavery came to dominate the labour systems of the Americas for pragmatic rather than ideological reasons, we might wonder when ideology – and theories of race – entered the picture. Davis ...”

“... Valley leaders, and his book is in part an argument that states should intervene to constrain the powers of AI companies. He sets out a plausible case that we will see highly accelerated technological progress, driven by but not limited to AI, that there are very significant risks associated with this and that 21st-century politics isn’t well placed to deal ...”

“... experience included riot control in Belfast – was educated in Co. Cork and his superior, Michael O’Dwyer, was a Catholic from Tipperary.With empire comes slavery. Bishop Berkeley owned slaves on Rhode Island. Burke was a tepid abolitionist because of the interests of friends and family. Irish involvement was extensive, eventually as masters. When ...”

“... I want to take up some comments on Berlin’s essay by an acute critic of the liberal tradition, Michael Sandel. Berlin ‘comes perilously close to foundering on the relativist predicament’: If one’s convictions are only relatively valid, why stand for them unflinchingly? In a tragically configured moral universe, such as Berlin assumes, is the ideal ...”

“... between the upper and the lower cases. Almost everyone is some sort of nationalist, including even Michael Forsyth, the new Tory Secretary of State for Scotland. In retreat, the Conservatives have discovered that true Unionism awarded Scotland just as much nationalism as was good for it, via Scots Law, institutional autonomy and new devices like the National ...”

“... as to suggest that they are monsters while Matilda, who really is miraculous in that she has magic powers, fails to be recognised by her parents. Her mother, unaware that she was pregnant until very near the point of delivery, neither wanted a baby nor knew what to do with one; her father was expecting a boy (he persists in calling Matilda ‘boy’ till ...”

“... novels have survived, thanks to the efforts of such admirers as J.B. Priestley, Doris Lessing and Michael Holroyd, and to the biographical enterprise set in train by his older brother, Bruce, whose memoir of Patrick, The Light Went Out (1972), prompted the first Hamilton mini-revival. Bruce was upfront about his brother’s drinking: his book is the source of ...”

“... themselves did not apply. In the years before Spitzer turned to the Martin Act, these draconian powers had mainly been used against small-time fraudsters. There was, Thompson said, ‘an unspoken gentleman’s agreement’ that it shouldn’t be used against major financial institutions. Dark pools were originally set up in the US in the late 1980s as an ...”

“... confrontations between one European citizenry and another) and beef up the European Commission’s powers to control the budgets of EU member states. The idea that ‘market forces’ would bring about convergence within the Eurozone has effectively been abandoned. In its place is a strange mixture of French and German ideas about how Europe – and states in ...”

“... by a truck. Much has been written about Biden as ‘America’s mourner’, given preternatural powers of empathy by the loss of his wife, his daughter and then, in 2015, his son Beau, from brain cancer. ‘The sensation I had,’ Biden wrote, ‘was best captured in a line I knew from a sonnet by John Milton: “I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my ...”

“... the Sidneys protected in Elizabeth’s reign, and whose revolutionary pamphlet ‘How superior powers ought to be obeyed’ seems to me to be echoed by Geron in the eclogues of Book Four of Arcadia. In editing Arcadia, Greville brought forward to Book One the Ister Bank poem – the fable of the beasts. There Sidney recounts the political philosophy he had ...”

“... that Lemkin argued should be included. Entire sections were left out of the convention. Imperial powers such as Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, which were then attempting to suppress anti-colonial uprisings, wanted genocide to be defined in a way that would not restrict their activities. Settler-colonial states – Australia, the United States ...”

“... production’. Whether Wilson expected the union leaders, whom he knew well, to bite is not clear. Michael Foot gave the rationale for killing off the idea when he rose in the Commons to say that the Left was not against an incomes policy – ‘indeed, we believe such a policy is essential to socialism’ – but that in this case the Government had ...”

“... like a mug’s game at the best of times, with all those writers perpetually at the peak of their powers, but there’s a special reason for the whistling-in-the-dark tone of the cover copy for Neel Mukherjee’s fourth novel, Choice – ‘breathtaking and devastating’ it says, as a placeholder, on the proof, though the finished version settles on ‘a ...”

“... cast off for Istanbul. Robin made his way south through Bulgaria, which was about to join the Axis powers, and in a matter of days he and Micheline were reunited.Inever saw​ Granny Helen smoke, though I do know that during the war she carried a full cigarette case, as a strategy. I remember only in outline the story my father told me of these cigarettes, the ...”