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“... accounts of enlightened enquiry. Unlike Dava Sobel’s popular caricature of the clockmaker John Harrison, for example, Pancaldi’s carefully characterised Volta was not a solitary persecuted genius hunting the solution to the great scientific problem of his time. Other equally ludicrous fables of the progress of science and technology tell us that the ...”

“... when the Nazis discovered that the Wittgensteins had Jewish ancestors and so, by the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, were suddenly liable to have their considerable wealth confiscated. How this self-invented dynasty dealt with and survived the loss of what Ludwig would call, in his philosophical writings, their ‘form of life’, and what this return of a ...”

“... Loi Taubira’s second article in the name of ‘parallelism’ (with the dubious logic that both laws attempted to mandate an ‘official history’). In his foreword to Edouard Glissant’s Mémoires des esclavages, the former prime minister Dominique de Villepin writes that ‘today France wants to look into the face of this tragedy that has left so many ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... defendants (the journalists, Crispin Aubrey and Duncan Campbell, and the former signals corporal, John Berry) meditating passing any information to ‘the enemy’ – except (an important qualification) insofar as the British Security Services have always regarded the British public as the enemy. The ABC Trial was intended to be a sensational public show ...”

“... Fulke Greville, whose life of Sidney is the more substantial of the two treatises edited by John Gouws as The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke – the other being A Letter to an Honourable Lady, where the lifelong bachelor Greville offered a mistreated wife (now unidentifiable, and perhaps imaginary) the questionable benefit of his advice and ...”

“... many devastations and upheavals before such a league of peoples comes to pass. But the natural laws which govern the development of our species, engendering a productive common order out of colliding individual wills in the form of a competitive economy which strengthens the state, should in the end also lead to the formation of a world society out of the ...”

“... that first used the atomic bomb under these circumstances, we have sinned grievously against the laws of God and against the people of Japan. In a life of public acts and public speaking, Niebuhr gave a concrete sense to the work of seeing the beam that is in your own eye. He did it characteristically by asking what we have in common with our unlucky ...”

“... a point. It was across from what would become the new St Patrick’s Cathedral. The archbishop, John Joseph Hughes, had intended to buy the land for his own residence but was outbid by Restell – payback for his denunciation of her from the pulpit. In revenge, Wright says, she built ‘a house so ostentatious that parishioners at St Patrick’s would be ...”

“... began by aborting Constitutional change and is ending in a state of Constitutional rigor mortis. John Major’s Government contemplates no political evolution whatever on the mainland, as distinct from in Ireland, and advertises this rigidity as ‘defence of the Union’. When it founders, however, such intransigence will be overtaken by long overdue ...”