“... on the circumstances in which it is appropriate to rewrite a constitution, and this usually means removing the drafting of constitutional amendments from the normal political process. But in Britain, Parliament can draft new statutes amending the constitution any time it likes, and it does not have to worry whether these new statutes can be justified in ...”

“... to those capable of understanding it, a specific message. Inner lives matter, but so does the means by which they might be communicated and made to count. Neck-ties were a feminist issue. Cicely Hamilton appears in Rebel Women as a suffragette playwright and as the co-founder (with Bessie Hatton) of the Women Writers’ Suffrage League. But Hamilton ...”

“... openly, Benthamite hedonism covertly – that the end of happiness justifies whatever means are necessary to obtain it. If the goal of full Communism requires the crushing of free trade unions, the murder of the kulaks or the torture of dissenters, then trade unions must be crushed, kulaks murdered and dissenters tortured. If the competitive ...”

“... and desperate to understand them. He has done his best to educate himself about what it all means, with the help of the friends he has made at the top of the tech industry. And he is keen to share what he has learned.The result is a chapter in which he provides his own potted history of how technology works, from Moore’s Law to Central Processing ...”

“... it is for us to examine – as the genuine diary, covering the years 1930 to 1939, of a certain David Peterley, scion of an ancient landed family. Peterley’s diary and other papers, so ran the Foreword by its ‘editor’ Richard Pennington, occupy a large red box in the McGill University Library, of which Pennington was the chief librarian, and the diary ...”

“... between healthy and unhealthy scoring systems. Good games deploy essentially arbitrary means of keeping score. Their measures of achievement exist not as ends in themselves but simply as devices to allow creative/competitive/co-operative activity to take place under their auspices. The fact that in contract bridge spades and hearts score thirty ...”

“... self-deception as well as cruelty was a danger of ‘all the wars of interest and intrigue’ (he means all wars except those of immediate self-preservation or rebellion against despotism). Wars generally are driven by ‘avarice, envy and ambition’, and foreign wars in the cause of liberty always subvert liberty in principle: the character of our ends must ...”

“... if we can’t live with them we might have to kill them. Schmitt was, for a time, a Nazi, which means that his view is if anything even grimmer than it sounds. But it does make clear that squabbling over who gets to sit on the next appointments committee doesn’t necessarily deserve to be called politics. So how come office battles often feel ...”

“... are so many stars out there, Cocconi and Morrison explained. Many are similar to our sun, which means that Earth-like conditions, in which our own species evolved, might be fairly common throughout the galaxy. Cocconi and Morrison were further convinced that countless civilisations were likely to have developed ‘scientific interests’ and ‘technical ...”

“... as Smolin sees it, is the mental leap required of us when isolating the part from the whole. It means ignoring all the many ways in which each part is embedded within the universe – all its myriad relationships and interactions with neighbouring parts. By practising this mental leap for centuries, Smolin believes, physicists have become accustomed to ...”

“... it demanded our full commitment, in favour of something that is, at best, marginal? Iraq is by no means the only potential supplier of WMD to terrorists, and has no proven link with the most dangerous of them. Furthermore Iraq has been subjected to such a degree of international scrutiny since 1991 that it would be difficult for the Iraqis to take any action ...”

“... settings I don’t know.’ Then again, he may have been played. In the New York Times, Larry David responded to Maher’s account of his cheery time visiting the commander-in-chief with an alternative version: ‘My Dinner with Adolf.’ ‘It wasn’t just a one-way street, with the Führer dominating the conversation. He was inquisitive and asked me a ...”

“... projectionist (‘SS-man Ellerkamp’) and the Cosmologist (a Strangelove figure set in a Caspar David Friedrich icescape) add to the richness of the texture while reinforcing the central ideal that what we are seeing is no more than a film about a film. Hitler, muses Ellerkamp, was ‘the greatest film-maker of all time’. Two principal narrators, Harry ...”

“... is the story, told in Philip Hoare’s 1995 biography, of Coward’s visit to the Court to see David Storey’s grittily realistic Rugby League play The Changing Room. His attention having been drawn to the male genitalia on display in the bath scene, Coward remarked: ‘13 acorns are not worth the price of admission.’ ‘Not worth the price of ...”

“... the lascivious Jew who seduces young maidens and exercises cynical control over German culture by means of his cold intellect. These moments, however, are scarcely sufficient to convict Walser of anti-semitism. And there are counter-indications which his critics omit to mention. Not all the elements of Ehrl-König’s character can be traced back to ...”