“... elsewhere on the island, or even as lieutenant to a completely different pirate ‘king’ called John Plantain. It’s a confusing picture. ‘What,’ Graeber asks, ‘is one to make of all this?’In Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia he tries to answer this question. As the title suggests, for Graeber there is more at stake here than one would ...”

“... whom he has no other use. Equally, though the period had its rent-a-quote men, most notably Sydney Smith, he resists the temptation to overuse them. Among the best of his lesser wits is Agnes, estranged wife of the Anglican educationalist Joseph Bell. She persecuted her husband ingeniously by endorsing her letters to him on the outside with jokes about his ...”

“... resistant when it comes to abandoning myths. To cite a parallel example, my friend and colleague, John Chilton, has proved conclusively that although the great Blues singer Bessie Smith died following a car accident, it was not because she was refused treatment by a white Southern hospital – a version that is still widely ...”

“... go wrong and absorb more forces ... quote a strong body wanted just to leave it on one side. But John Fieldhouse and I were quite keen to have a go because we thought we could do it and also felt we needed a success. We hadn’t many successes politically. We also needed a success militarily to get Ministers to believe in what are could do because a lot of ...”

“... Great newspaper editors have not been the fashion in the post-war years. Some editors, like John Junor of the Sunday Express, have been long-lasting. Others, like his fellow knights Larry Lamb and David English, have been successful after their fashion, Lamb with the Sun and English with the Daily Mail. English (also a survivor) deserves credit for ...”

“... what amounts to the same schedule of risks. This spells a bad day for the project pioneered by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern in the mid-20th century, of creating univocal preference functions for individual economic actors based on their revealed preferences. Someone who prefers one outcome to another when it’s presented in one way, but reverses ...”

“... most reviewers agreed with them. She always had a small circle of devotees – the producer Oliver Smith commissioned her to write a play that year, and kept giving her money over the decade it took her to finish it. But the general incomprehension and dismissal discouraged her, and when asked for a new story for an anthology she claimed she had nothing to ...”

“... League, with the title ‘How Not to Translate Marx’. The translator he had in mind was John Broadhouse, a pseudonym for the journalist Henry Mayers Hyndman, who was notorious both for his socialism and his pronounced antisemitism (he once said of Marx’s daughter Eleanor that she ‘inherited in her nose and mouth the Jewish type from Marx ...”

“... development or under-development. Ged Martin and Benjamin Kline discuss emigration and identities. John MacKenzie supplies a piece on imperial art. Finally, Marshall, followed by an Australian, an African and an Indian, offer their own, inevitably different, verdicts on Empire’s legacy. Throughout, we are reminded that British power to control events was ...”

“... toward the speedy attainment of what is truest.’ Here, well over a century before Adam Smith, was the theory of the marketplace of ideas. In the mouth of Justice Holmes, echoing John Stuart Mill, this became part of the jurisprudence of the First Amendment: ‘The best test of truth is the power of the thought to ...”

“... read poetry. Ian Hamilton edited a selection of Lewis’s work, and there is a good biography by John Pikoulis. But his achievement has been hard to focus on. He moved quickly as a poet, and the poetry he wrote while on home service is markedly different from that written after his arrival in India in December 1942. There are also short stories, among the ...”

“... name was Kweksylber (‘quicksilver’). He was at various times Joe Liss, Joe Eligmann, James Smith, Joseph Schmidt, Charlie Silver, Charles Greenbaum, Abraham Ramer, Ludwig; these are just a few of his ghost-names. Silver had indeed been in New York City in the early 1890s, a low-grade thief, thug, jailbird and police informer. Convicted of stealing a ...”

“... anyone vote for Barack Obama? Not why would anyone want to see Obama elected president rather than John McCain (or Hillary Clinton for that matter), but why would anyone who desired that outcome think that his or her individual vote could make the slightest difference in helping to bring it about? General elections are never decided by a single vote, so no ...”

“... Falklands, where lightning can ignite the tussock-grass in spring. You can make a case for John Davis or Sir Richard Hawkins, just as if you are not English you can make a case for some earlier Iberian voyage. The articles ‘Falkland’s Islands’ in the last two editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica give the honour to the English as if there was ...”

“... years in one significant respect: his freedom from adherence to natural fact. That would, as Greg Smith argued in an illuminating recent essay, have set him squarely against one of the main aesthetic assumptions shared by his contemporaries.* ‘Nature is not at all the standard of art, but art is the standard of nature,’ runs one of the aphorisms Herbert ...”