“... However, everything at Summerhill – where lessons are voluntary and the pupils invent their own laws – is put to a vote, and the children decided they wanted to keep the tepee for themselves. So for the summer of 1993 I lived in a bed and breakfast in Leiston. All the other guests worked for Sizewell B: every piece of crockery and all the towels and ...”

“... presented by Baroness Joan Vickers to the House of Lords in 1977 – is for the abolition of all laws relating to prostitution. But, yet again, it is not simple. Do I personally want to let my spare room to a prostitute? No, not as long as I can get any other tenant. But this ‘legal’ trade – and we would be even deeper into hypocrisy if we tried to ...”

“... He added that ‘the exact figures are 1.167, but something must, of course, beconceded to the laws of scansion.’ But this is so ludicrous thatit is almost certainly a joke. Indeed, where geniality stops and grimness starts in Babbage is a question that has puzzled students of his personality. The last biography of him was called Irascible Genius, but Mr ...”

“... Wars, and much less, provoke vehement disagreement. There are only a few ‘upright men’ (John Heilbron’s word for Max Planck in The Dilemmas of an Upright Man) who are able to cope with contradictions in an effort to achieve some sort of balance and perspective even under the most trying circumstances. Wallace is by no means a cynic, however, and ...”

“... organisation with anti-semitism and anti-Catholicism. Half a century later, Cobb County elected a John Bircher to Congress five times; it is now represented by Newt Gingrich. Although a 1967 Supreme Court decision finally overturned the Georgia state law that barred racial intermarriage, in 1986 the Supreme Court upheld a Georgia statute outlawing consensual ...”

“... at his own expense. Poor Pronek. At least three people he passes have a copy of Seven Spiritual Laws of Growth (is this title ever so slightly unlikely?); he is continually asked what he thinks of the baseball scene, and whether America isn’t the best country in the world. His initial answer to the last question is ‘I don’t know, I just ...”

“... stuff of animated cartoons, which did not accept the world as it was – or even acknowledge the laws of physics. Cartoons provided a means for technology to oppose itself; at the very least, they might provide an ‘inoculation against mass psychoses’. And cartoons were funny. By evoking collective laughter with their open exploration of ‘sadistic ...”

“... a century of nearly ceaseless warfare. The first era of easy money began after English usury laws were amended in 1714 to allow no lending over 5 per cent; in France rates fell even lower. Two of the first modern crises caused by the bursting of asset bubbles followed shortly afterwards, when the Mississippi and South Sea Companies collapsed in 1720.By ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In May 1983 he was promoted to assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Vessey, and over the next couple of years he oversaw a secret team – operating in part out of the office of Daniel Murphy, Bush’s chief of staff – which quietly conducted at least 35 covert operations against drug trafficking, terrorism and, most ...”

“... Entwistle could well live out the rest of his days in Worksop. Had he not driven back to his in-laws’ house in Carver, Mass., and replaced the revolver, he might be in Worksop now. But tests on the Colt, done on 8 February, identified it as the murder weapon and connected it with Entwistle. On 9 February, three weeks after the killings, he was charged in ...”

“... In Arthur Schlesinger’s court history, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which might without unfairness be called the founding breviary of the cult of JFK, there appears the following vignette. Schlesinger had been asked to carpenter a ‘White Paper’ justifying Washington’s destabilisation of Cuba, in which the high-flown rhetoric of the New Frontier might form a sort of scab over the fouler business of empire ...”

“... among journalist colleagues for taking his success too seriously.Woodward turned to the comedian John Belushi and another kind of fall: tragic early death. He wrote books about the CIA and the Pentagon, on Clinton and Alan Greenspan, carrying on at the Post as well, making a name for himself as a reporter and author others wished to emulate. He’d brought ...”

“... According to John Cheever, 1948 was ‘the year everybody in the United States was worried about homosexuality’. And nobody was more worried than the federal government, which was rumoured to be teeming with gays and lesbians. One might think that Washington’s attentions would have been focused elsewhere – on the Soviet Union, for example, or on Communist spies – but in 1950, President Truman’s advisers warned him that ‘the country is more concerned about the charges of homosexuals in the government than about Communists ...”

“... to be said for taking the dim view, including the fact that the British kept the Fascist racial laws, even after they were scrapped in Italy. The implacably pro-Ethiopian Sylvia Pankhurst was rightly horrified by the British decision to seize and dismantle valuable quantities of plant and ship them out of the territory. Eritrea also doubled for the British ...”