“... 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 ...”

“... feeling that there must be more to political life than perpetual defeat. Neil Kinnock and John Smith felt this as strongly as their successors, but their successors went a lot further. In a famous essay published nearly ninety years ago, Max Weber suggested that politics was becoming the territory of the professional: politics was the politician’s ...”

“... the abstract with the concrete’, yet at the same time he insists that ‘the mind has laws, powers and principles of its own, and is not a mere dependent on matter.’ Hazlitt admired Lamb because his friend’s ‘love of the actual does not proceed from a want of taste for the ideal.’ ‘Taste’ in this context is both an accomplishment and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the time of the Rivonia trial by the South African minister of justice and later prime minster John Vorster, who remarked that he would swap all his emergency laws for the clause of the Special Powers Act which allowed the British authorities to arrest and detain without trial, ban meetings, take land and destroy ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the remains of Josef Mengele and giving congressional testimony about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, among other high-profile cases. He died nine years ago, but the colourful interviews and writings he left behind enable Hagerty to provide a substantial account. In 1984, Snow, a chain-smoker in cowboy boots, was invited to Argentina by the ...”

“... I noted down the names of Paul Ives, Graham Paine (‘who lost his life by drowning’), Clifford John Dunn, Ronald Alexander Pinn and John Hill, all of whom were born in the 1960s, as I was, and died early.The practice of using dead children’s identities began in the Metropolitan Police Force in the 1960s. Until very ...”

“... out in sermons was no-nonsense description of God’s determination to punish those who broke his laws with eternal torment in a fiery hell. Planted early and repeated often this dark theology can be hard to shake. Some Southerners after they grow up and move north leave the Baptist horrors behind, but not Mitchell. I would say that he did not really believe ...”

“... to shield him from the charge of being a closet republican, or a classical republican like John Toland. He believes in a ‘legal limited monarchy’, and has a humane idea of consensus and national unity within such an arrangement. He is an active, adept pragmatist, a revolutionary moderate. In Robinson Crusoe, Defoe speaks of Crusoe’s ‘life of ...”

“... or rather J.J. Beegan did. When I turned to the Irish census records I could quite easily find John Beegan, who was born in 1868, the eldest child of John and Jane Beegan. In 1901 they were living together with the younger Beegans, Mary and Thomas, at 23 Dunlo Hill in Ballinasloe. On the census form, ...”

“... in a bitter final chapter, ‘has not honoured the pain of our people in its politics’. John Jeffrey, the current deputy minister of justice, told him in September 2017 that turning a blind eye to the murder of the Cradock Four and others such as the activist Steve (Bantu) Biko ‘was the price that had to be paid’. Partly for budgetary ...”

“... his trial for murder, became a particular rallying point. In 1974, Hutchings shot and killed John Pat Cunningham, a 27-year-old man with severe learning difficulties, as he ran away from an army patrol. Johnny Mercer, the veterans’ affairs minister who led the campaign to protect former soldiers, described the passage of the Troubles Legacy Act last ...”

“... be necessary. China’s financial system puts private firms at a disadvantage: a number of the laws enacted in the 2000s exempt SOEs from restrictions on borrowing, making an already un-level playing field even more unfair. Making it easier for migrants to get SOE jobs would help, but Yueh would prefer to see SOEs continue to shrink. In her analysis ...”