“... trade union congress, political party – and voting for Britain to take back control of its laws and its borders is a Shavian paradox. Citing an IPPR survey from 2014, Barnett argues that ‘being deprived of a credible, representative power that clearly belongs to you’ leads to anger, not with the body that denies you that power (the British ...”

“... from other continents, who do not speak our language and who do not respect our culture, our laws, or our way of life: people who want to replace what is ours with what is theirs’. At an international summit on demographics, held in Budapest in 2019, he argued that allowing non-European immigration would ‘effectively be consenting to population ...”

“... that includes me). The much vaunted social and sexual changes of the period (including reforms of laws relating to homosexuality, abortion and divorce) were exaggerated in their extent and impact, limited in their reach (the pill was very slow to reach Hull), had their roots in earlier periods, or came to full fruition later on. The so-called permissive ...”

“... in the desert, where they have learned Spanish and been assigned new names: Simón and David. The man is old and people assume that the boy is his grandson. ‘Not my grandson, not my son,’ he explains. ‘But I am responsible for him.’ Novilla seems to be partly a spiritual state. Everyone there has made the same journey, by ship, and they ...”

“... to make sense of matter at the smallest scales. The tendency was to begin with the familiar laws that govern everyday objects – the motion of planets in the solar system, or the interaction of electric charges and radiation – and then append this or that ad hoc rule to cover instances when the usual equations broke down. Heisenberg set out to change ...”

“... men having sexual relations with Jewish women and his proposal of Nuremberg-style racial purity laws for Israel are at least in part a consequence of his guilt over the Evans tragedy. The attention Friedman pays to Kahane’s personal weakness and lack of principle has the paradoxical effect of rendering him less threatening than Friedman intends. If the ...”

“... the BBC and other bodies’ (he fell out with the BBC, too, and threatened to invoke the copyright laws to stop them transmitting his poetry). When he was evicted from a flat in Glasgow in 1949, he told the landlord that legally this house is yours but actually it will always be principally associated with me. I have done sufficient work of sufficient quality ...”

“... sure they assimilate to the Francophone rather than the Anglophone community. Québec’s language laws are the main target of Richler’s book (though he does admit that he has led a satisfying life there without ever learning to speak French). Camille Laurin, a minister in the Parti Québécois administration of 1976-85, argued the case for language ...”

“... it creates between wit and feeling, the poem recalls the fundamental antithesis between the laws and the experience of experience. Ultimately, it sides with feeling. Merrill’s poetry is commonly admired for its formal ingenuity. But the ingenuity was there from the beginning; what marks his development is the evolution of what we usually call ...”

“... that their masters don’t habitually roll out the tanks. We need also to take account of David Hume, who writes rather surprisingly that ‘force is always on the side of the governed,’ meaning that governments stay in power on the back of public opinion. For Bull, by contrast, the survival of the state is not a question of opinion, or even perhaps ...”

“... We have defied the laws of arithmetic,’ declared a buoyant David Steel after he had heard the result of the Croydon, North-West by-election, ‘One plus one really does equal three.’ It is now apparent that the public opinion polls were consistently correct in showing that, while support for the Liberal Party as such remained of a traditionally modest order and support for the Social Democrats alone was a similar or even smaller percentage, backing for the two-party alliance as a third force in British politics was a wholly different matter, and promised the chance of a complete breakthrough under the existing electoral system ...”

“... some even burned alive, for same-sex relationships, while the loving sexual relationship between David and Jonathan in the Old Testament has caused generations of biblical translators to tie themselves in knots trying to conceal the obvious. Christ himself made barely any pronouncements condemning sexuality. This has not stood in the way of Church ...”

“... his teacher, Oeser, the mannerist classicism of Fuseli and Girodet, and the realist classicism of David. Goethe, for long a serious and mediocre painter, was a better critic than he was a theorist. Against the arid connoisseurship of the proselytising essays in his periodical Propyläen – too conscious an attempt to educate public taste – the essays on ...”

“... justice (who isn’t?). He is also, on some accounts, a victim: his unfortunate mentor at the LSE, David Held, has described the predicament the ostensibly reform-minded Saif found himself in after his father’s people had revolted as ‘the stuff of Shakespeare’, but that surely is letting everyone concerned off far too lightly. He may just be a ...”

“... 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 ...”