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“... and flamingos, insisting that their pinkness, too, had evolved in accordance with the ‘laws of optical illusion’. He conducted his own muddy experiments to prove that a passing alligator might easily overlook a flamingo if it happened to be standing against a pink sunrise, and he made similar claims about the warpaint and eagle feathers worn by ...”

“... at his fanciful plots. Standardised in the mid-century US, in Astounding magazine, edited by John W. Campbell, Hard SF advertises consumer goods like personal robots and flying cars. It valorises space travel that culminates in successful (if difficult) contact with the alien life assumed to be strewn throughout the galaxies, and glows with a ...”

“... was indicted for ‘unlawfully receiving the naked private parts of a person in his mouth’; John Day for ‘permitting a person to handle [his] private parts naked’. In 1835 John Smith and James Pratt were spied through a keyhole having sex in a room in a lodging house on Blackfriars Road. ‘The detection of these ...”

“... fired half a million of them. What followed was not simply a state liquidation sale but a raft of laws – lowering corporate tax rates, permitting wholly owned foreign subsidiaries, welcoming foreign banks – even more radical than those introduced in Eastern Europe in the 1990s (‘getting Iraq ready for Wal-Mart’ as the former Bush-Cheney campaign ...”

“... Central Bank, but also the nations of the monetary union, their productive capacity, their laws and customs, their soil and water. That relation I mentioned, between the money quantities and the objects of desire, was maintained for a long time in Europe by the so-called precious metals. In a way that seems strange to us, the produce of mines of silver ...”

“... even mysterious lives opening out behind them – though lives subject to the same dark laws of morality and mortality that (in Quartet in Autumn) govern the fate of Marcia, Barbara Pym’s most grotesque and ‘romantic’ character, dying alone in her suburban house. As an artist of the suburban Barbara Pym was not, in fact, alone; she may even be ...”

“... inequality of wealth, speak of the same world as Peterley’s but seen from the opposite angle,’ John Wain has written. ‘There is no evidence that Peterley worries about social injustice, or thinks about it at all, for that matter.’ With whatever undertow of self-disapproval, Richard Pennington rises from an inferior social position through the phantom ...”

“... official lamp-standard, selling good design to industry and editing the high street with planning laws. Decisions about taste, if they are not made by the makers, are made by the choosers. And to choose you have to have something to choose from. In the years between the wars a number of loose, frequently overlapping groups of taste-makers and form-givers made ...”

“... Law gave state functionaries powers to appropriate ‘ancestral land’ for private sales. Both laws benefited anyone with good political connections. In Ituri, the Hema elite, very small indeed, was enriched as large numbers of Lendu peasants lost ‘customary’ land rights overnight. When Ugandan troops occupied Ituri in 1998, they began to collude with ...”

“... cannot be addressed without addressing Pakistan:To defeat an enemy that heeds no borders or laws of war, we must recognise the fundamental connection between the future of Afghanistan and Pakistan.Or, in the pithier statement made by Obama last October:In order to catch Osama bin Laden we have to win in Afghanistan and stabilise ...”

“... he looked at, Lorck looked at in a peculiar way. One bundle of drawings, which the diarist John Evelyn owned, was split up and sold at auction in 1966 – the compilers of this catalogue have been advertising rather forlornly in the art trade press for news of their whereabouts. The catalogue is Fischer’s life’s work. Many have worried about what ...”

“... phylactery shouted out by Verres’ victims pleading for a stay of crucifixion), recycled by John F. Kennedy with unavoidable bathos as ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ This great and by no means guaranteed victory against the establishment, as well as the addition of an entire province to his list of clients, helped ease Cicero’s way. But as consul he was ...”

“... of its offices: ‘At this location, 122 Commerce Street, was a very large warehouse owned by John Murphey, who provided support to the slave traders in the city.’ ‘I would have preferred not to have the additional markers,’ the mayor confessed, ‘but I believe they are part of history.’ He agreed to allow them, he said, because they would ...”

“... co-authored by Max Weber, provided for this action through its notorious Article 48, which allowed laws to be suspended ‘if public security and order are seriously endangered’. Hence the definition that Schmitt presented as early as 1922: ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception’ – a formula that gave legal cover to the Nazi dictatorship to ...”

“... economy when it sanctifies capitalist social relations and treats them as ‘fixed by natural laws and unchangeable’. Marx sounds to me like the first and perhaps most consistent leftist ironist. Politics needs dreams, however, and my dream for the day is to start a movement, even a party, of Ironist Marxists. We in the IMP would have an education ...”