“... of Mount Desert Island and about its history, from Champlain who named it in the 17th century to John D. Rockefeller, but he still can’t accept it as a real place. When she talks of her friends, he asks: ‘Do they come even to a place as out-of-the-way as this?’ As if exasperated, she replies: ‘Let’s not rehash the myth of my solitude yet ...”

“... would betray confusion to deny that a legal system was valid because one thought that many of the laws in it were bad. On a parallel analysis of morality, two adherents of the same adequate moral system could disagree about its implications in a particular case, but this would be a real disagreement and it would not be possible for contradictory assertions to ...”

“... that it would ever ascend to such dizzy heights. In the course of the agitation against the Corn Laws in the early 1840s, the movement’s leaders, Richard Cobden and John Bright, gave encouragement to a proposal by a young Scotsman, James Wilson, to set up a weekly newspaper that would argue for the cause of free ...”

“... false position which hides fear behind a protective screen of supposedly objective facts, laws or norms. The first step in combatting it is to announce clearly: ‘What, then, is to be done? We must aussprechen was ist, “state the facts”, admit the truth that there is a tendency, or an opinion, in our Central Committee . . .’ What happened when ...”

“... of entire social groups that happen to get in the way. And then there is what Michael Walzer and John Rawls both call a ‘supreme emergency’, when direct attacks on civilian targets are required in circumstances of dire military necessity. Since, in the nuclear age, ‘supreme emergency has become a permanent condition,’ this means that it is legitimate ...”

“... is responsible for the budget and internal affairs, but only the King can legislate, publish laws, treaties and concessions. A decree of 1961 forbids the formation of political parties, and prohibits the profession of any ideology other than ‘Islam’. Anyone engaging in ‘violent action against the state or the royal family’ is liable to ...”

“... sciences, in the 18th century, were always said to be in a parlous state. Newton had laid down the laws: the Enlightenment was about playing his tunes. Apart from this prolonged act of deference, a deference then broken by the ‘Romantic’ reaction, nothing much was going on, in geology, or natural history, or medicine, or any-where else. All these, it was ...”

“... moral and physical welfare of the tropical traveller. No recent guide has surpassed the excellent John Hatt’s remarks on underwear in The Tropical Traveller (1982). Hatt insists that this ‘must be of pure cotton’ and urges a change of attitude, or perhaps a readjustment, for anyone foolish enough to hit the tropics wearing ‘the “jockey” style of ...”

“... themselves, or to priests or nurses, while the heroic surgeon sawed on. Half a century ago, John Alfred Ryle, the founder of social medicine, declared that one of the mistakes of scientific medicine was to have shelved the problem of pain. With both clinical and humane ends in mind, he called for fresh study. Since then things have indeed improved, but ...”

“... Most OuLiPian texts astonish not by their powers of expansion, however, but by their self-imposed laws of constraint. The best known of these are Georges Perec’s lipogrammatic La Disparition (1969), composed without once using the letter e, and his Les Revenentes (1972), which contains no vowels except e. Over the years OuLiPians have developed or recovered ...”

“... redemption, and include the news that Effie Bawn was the nicest person to live in Glasgow since St John Ogilvie. But before that day, as a reformed woman, Netta would rinse her clothes in Barlinnie Prison, for other niceness, and other reform. She incited a crowd to riot, and was said to be behind the suffragette burning of Leuchars Station. Netta held young ...”

“... boat. This time, however, it was not the thought of pretty girls that diverted him but his friend John Evelyn’s ‘pretty’ new book ‘against Solitude’. Evelyn’s Publick employment and an active life prefer’d to solitude, published in 1667, was written to refute Sir George Mackenzie’s 1665 work, A Moral Essay, Preferring Solitude to Public ...”

“... not vested interests, which are dangerous for good and evil. The author of this passage was John Maynard Keynes. His words were not carelessly uttered but form the pregnant last paragraph of his magnum opus, The General Theory, published in 1936. This obviously expressed his hope that his own ideas would be disseminated through such a process and in ...”

“... insanely short and lend insanely long. Many books have been written about the Darien Scheme. John Prebble’s The Darien Disaster of 1968 is still the best known. But The Price of Scotland surpasses them all on two grounds: first, Watt’s method and approach; second, his solidly convincing version of the story’s most contested aspect – the ...”

“... America itself was constantly on the move, due in no small measure to partible inheritance laws which, in contrast to primogeniture, destroyed the bond between family and land and forced the dispossessed children of the gentry to break their own ground in ‘the valleys of the Mississippi’. Even everyday language was volatile: old words took on new ...”