“... 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 ...”

“... beyond the federal boundary, or even marking trees to signal future claims. Twenty years later, John Quincy Adams did not hesitate to send troops to burn down squatters’ homes and crops in Alabama. But these legal enforcements would be swept away in the coming demographic storm. The settler-sceptical northeastern Federalists had many political ...”

“... erudition ends in the bathos of this small parable of the divided soul of economic man. The laws of rule – the social realities of the accumulation of power and property in the history of the West – were so forgotten in the mists of the rule of law, the ideal habitat of the self-employed man, that Oakeshott could actually write with boyish ...”

“... side’s backers holding the tap on Hong Kong’s daily water supply. Two harsh-looking Hong Kong laws, the Public Order Ordinance and the Societies Ordinance, forbade unauthorised demonstrations or ‘foreign political organisations or bodies from conducting political activities in the Region’, ‘foreign’ discreetly left undefined. The actual solution ...”

“... betting shop in Tufnell Park. Two things​ happened to change this. The first was the decision of John Major’s government to introduce a national lottery in 1994. At a stroke it became impossible for the government to maintain its position that gambling should not be stimulated by advertising, since it was now determined to advertise its own product. The ...”

“... of accounting for it. The analogy is misleading, however. Historiography does not possess covering laws like those of the natural sciences, nor codifications of them into paradigms. It is an altogether looser fabric, in which the discovery of an anomalous patch here and there is less likely to unravel the whole cloth, obliging it to be rewoven to a different ...”