“... struggle between the five daimyo and is based on the life of the navigator William Adams (renamed John Blackthorne in the book). Adams was the first Englishman to reach Japan, where he served in Ieyasu’s court. In both the novel and its recent TV adaptation, Blackthorne is a savvy operator, arriving in Japan at the right moment to revolutionise the ...”

“... and competing political tendencies; between little Englanders (such as Richard Cobden and John Bright) on the one hand and chauvinist imperialists (such as Lord Palmerston and Joseph Chamberlain) on the other; between a maritime and peaceful trading nation and a military-imperial superpower; between a petit-bourgeois electorate, fired by the ...”

“... complexity of the mathematics involved in derivatives can’t be exaggerated. This was the reason John Meriwether, a famous bond trader, employed Myron Scholes – of the Scholes-Black equation – and the man with whom Scholes shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Economics, Robert Merton, to be directors and co-founders of his new hedge fund Long-Term Capital ...”

“... Henry Adams reports in his autobiography that at a dinner at the American Embassy at which John Bright was the chief British guest, he thumped the table and announced: ‘the English are a nation of brutes and should be exterminated to the last man.’ This statement shocked Henry Adams, James Russell Lowell, the Minister, and the other Americans ...”

“... create in order to escape the misery of their natural condition are subject to nothing but the laws that produced that misery in the first place. ‘The Law of Nations,’ Hobbes wrote, ‘and the Law of Nature, is the same thing. And every Soveraign hath the same Right, in procuring the safety of his People, that any particular man can have, in procuring ...”

“... Adam from the harder world outside and he dutifully observes all its quaint rules as sacred laws. Originally, Lodge tells us, he wanted to call his novel ‘The British Museum has lost its charm’, but the Gershwin estate objected. In fact, the catholic dome in Bloomsbury has never been portrayed in a more seedily charming and futile way than in The ...”

“... He was responsible – in his own words – for ‘ministers driven into retirement, laws repealed, great social reforms initiated, bills transformed, estimates remodelled, acts passed, generals nominated, governors appointed, armies sent hither and thither, war proclaimed and war averted’. It’s no wonder he had such a high opinion of ...”

“... citizens. Christopher Hitchens has jeeringly said that many American leftists are more afraid of John Ashcroft than they are of Osama bin Laden. I am exactly the sort of person Hitchens has in mind. Ever since the White House rammed the USA Patriot Act through Congress, I have spent more time worrying about what my government will do than about what the ...”

“... shows in rich detail that the Nazi state did a lot for working men and women, passing hundreds of laws strengthening social security provision. Under Hitler, German workers saw their holiday entitlement double, while landlords had a tougher time raising rents or ejecting tenants. The onset of war in 1939 further intensified the desire to keep workers ...”

“... beginning of things could be disastrous to science. Its consequence would be that ‘the laws of physics could break down anywhere’ so that ‘predictability would disappear completely’: something of an exaggeration, one might think, yet perhaps containing enough truth to make singularity theorems unpopular with prize-givers. In any case, Hawking ...”

“... mechanics and information processing.All fridges, including Einstein’s, are governed by the laws of thermodynamics, which rest on the distinction between heat and temperature. As Sen puts it, ‘Heat never spontaneously flows from cold to hot.’ If I hold a hot stone in my cold hands, it will cool down. Similarly, food placed inside a refrigerator will ...”

“... During the Second World War they were known as ‘victory girls’ and ‘patriotutes’. Though laws were passed that banned them from barracks and allowed for their imprisonment if they were suspected of spreading VD, these women – and the men with whom they consorted – continued to trouble the boundary between love and sex, and between sex and war.In ...”

“... historical question. Sometimes, however, there are simple explanations for complex events, and John Gray has one to offer: ‘Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion.’ This might appear a sweeping generalisation, but, for Gray, seemingly diverse historical phenomena are manifestations of a single, heavily disguised and hydra-headed ...”

“... of time, Murray can tell us things prohibited to his predecessor by discretion and the libel laws. At the same time, like Murray’s other biographies, this one holds the central ground of its subject very ably and maintains a respectful but clear-sighted perspective. No blackwash, no hagiography, no wild critical assessments.‘An English ...”

“... to the life of the nation, in the sense of a people living in accordance with its traditional laws and political values, comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these. That is the true measure of what terrorism may achieve. It is for Parliament to decide whether to give the terrorists such a victory.* You would ...”