“... douched, frozen, pilled, potioned, lotioned, salivated … by Act of Parliament?’ blustered John Gibbs, hydropath and teetotaller, in a pamphlet denouncing the act. The anti-vaccination movement was born. It was, initially, little more than a collection of outraged scribblers: the 1853 Act was easily evaded and Poor Law Unions, which had quite enough to ...”

“... to the state on a scale of generality that is positively Dostoevskian. Caleb Williams attacks the laws that keep poor men subservient to rich men, while also exploring the patterns of thought that make social change and real personal independence terribly hard to achieve. In a competition judged by Henry James, Caleb Wiliams would not be short-listed, but if ...”

“... that perhaps implied some unease over what exactly the painting was doing. For the poet and critic John Yau, the painting’s placement signalled its exclusion from the canon and by the same token Lam’s secondary status as a mere follower of Picasso or an imitator of Surrealism. MoMA’s current retrospective, When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream (until 12 ...”

“... in a scientific way of thinking is a ‘potential executioner’. The ‘temptation to apply the laws of evolution to society soon becomes irresistible. All men flow together into a “mass” subordinated to the “great lines of evolution”, while he, with his reason, dominates those “great lines”. He is a free man; they are slaves.’ This analysis ...”

“... of aristocratic families in decline, who retained pretentions to mighty connections (such as King John Sobieski) even as they subsided into ruin. His father Jan Norwid died in a debtors’ prison, and his mother died when he was only four. The Polish youth of the period was devoted to plotting and to fantasies of vengeance. In secret conventicles, forbidden ...”

“... with the frankly socialist movement associated with such names as Keir Hardie, Tom Mann and John Burns, but Bernard Shaw (in spite of his philandering, of which Beatrice strongly disapproved) was a regular guest at the famous Webb lunches. Manual workers were conspicuous by their absence. Possibly Beatrice never quite escaped from the conventional class ...”

“... trope.Then several things happened. The owner of Books and Bookmen, an operator by the name of John Dosse, took the opportunity of emulating the Masada faction and the Goebbelses, and committed suicide himself. I received a moist letter from the editor of the magazine, written in the tone of ‘I hope you’re satisfied now.’ I was accused in print, by ...”

“... but whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws and the traditions of the people, or in deference to abstract principles and arbitrary and general doctrines.’ At least until recently nearly all Conservatives were similarly opposed to doctrine and ideology. To choose just two examples, ...”

“... was locked up came under German jurisdiction, and Lucia, classified as unworthy of life under Nazi laws governing the mentally defective, could have been murdered. Joyce moved heaven and earth to get her to safety, but died before he could do so. He had fled from one form of nationalism in Ireland, and was now up against an infinitely more noxious version of ...”

“... told what the half-naked men ‘clubbing together’ under inadequate rugs are up to. True to the laws of prurience, Greenwood closed his third instalment by implying that he could easily reveal ‘horrors . . . infinitely more revolting than anything that appears in these pages’. The many scholars who examined ‘A Night’ before Koven have been slow to ...”

“... Fox, while lesser opposition members, on the balcony of Brooks’s club, hold up a ‘New Code of Laws’ over a tray of severed heads with the caption ‘Killed off for the Public Good’. Meanwhile, across the street, outside the Tory White’s club, two gentlemen have been hanged from a lamp-post by the English armée du people, and one of them is ...”

“... including first-rate 18th-century portraits by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Devis, John Opie, Jonathan Richardson and Richard Cosway, among others. The small, unattributed canvas he disposes of in 1928 is not in the same league. But it does come with an intriguing back story. Most of Henry Howard’s family’s wealth originally came from sugar ...”

“... and Astronautics, who has come up with 52, one for each week of the year. Augustine’s Laws uses its axioms to mock bureaucratic routine, state regulation of economic activity, administratively defined corporate policy and spurious expertise. Law Number XXXI: ‘The optimum committee has no members.’ Law Number MLVII: ‘Two-thirds of the ...”

“... democracy. If the Communist regime refused this logic and clung to its old ways, the laws of social science would condemn it to economic stagnation. Either way America had nothing to fear.In his cool-headed history, Schism, Paul Blustein takes issue with both these interpretations. So too do Bob Davis and Lingling Wei in their more journalistic ...”

“... who died in 2017, was one of the greatest moral thinkers of the past century, perhaps even since John Stuart Mill. Edmonds rightly believes that if Parfit’s ideas about personal identity, rationality and equality were absorbed into our moral and political thinking, they would radically alter our beliefs about punishment, the distribution of social ...”