“... 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 ...”

“... World War saw communist parties win 10 per cent of the vote in Brazil and Chile, leading to gag laws and bans as Latin American leaders adopted Washington’s Cold War agenda. But Bohoslavsky argues that the ‘anti-totalitarian’ discourse of the Cold War also had a different effect: from the 1940s to the early 1960s, Latin American conservatives in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... works as much, if not more, through the ‘production of truth’ as through the imposition of laws. The question is not whether someone actually is a victim of trauma but how the criteria for deciding who is a victim come into being and who manages them. ‘Governmentality’, as Foucault calls this process of determining how truth and falsehood are ...”

“... was: that bloodied face, the hero’s grimace, the whole thing like a campaign advert directed by John Ford. In Milwaukee, I bumped into Robert Auth, a member of the New Jersey General Assembly, who began telling me and a Swedish journalist that the Republican Party had always been all about surviving and staying on course. ‘We’re shocked,’ he ...”

“... of the anti-homosexual law in Paragraph 175 of the German penal code in 1935. Unlike other Nazi laws, this was not repealed at the end of the war. Other communities who have been oppressed – Jewish people, say, or Catholics in Northern Ireland – have every opportunity to work out the implications of their oppression in their early lives. They hear the ...”

“... or was it, as the writer Hilton Als put it, ‘a high-faggot style’, or did it originate, as John Edgar Wideman claimed, from a mixture of the King James Bible and African American speech? Was it full of the clarity, eloquence and intelligence that Chinua Achebe suggested? And was Baldwin’s involvement with the Civil Rights Movement a cautionary tale ...”