“... 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 ...”

“... the same joke. There were, as it happened, three officers in the mess who, under the Nuremberg laws, counted as Jews. In addition there was an Irishman, who giggled a great deal, and was a toady of Sir J’s, and who had a hooked nose. And the nightly joke was that there were four Jews in the mess. Sir J made it clear that he extended me no protection, and ...”

“... than with the interests of reason and truth. Territorial imperatives were clearly at stake when John Searle (in a recent number of the New York Review of Books) gave a simplified account of Jonathan Culler’s On Deconstruction, and used it to launch an attack on this whole new breed of overweening literary theorists. From this point of view, deconstruction ...”

“... a certain respectability; my personal favourite is Terry Bisson’s Fire on the Mountain, in which John Brown’s raid succeeds and a black socialist republic emerges in the South, as prosperous and superior in relation to its shrunken rust-belt northern neighbour as West Germany was to the East in the old days. And there remains the lingering mystery of what ...”

“... not draw attention to itself and that it should work in optimal co-operation with nature, with the laws governing the ebb and flow of biological energy. A technique called ‘range of intensity limitation’ flattens the music out to make it unnoticeable, ‘like wind playing between the leaves of trees’ (Joe Coco, Muzak engineer for more than forty ...”

“... published in 1988, when he showed the historian rising above the philosophe pursuit of general laws to write narratives of true historical complexity; I find this reinforced by Gibbon’s early Essai sur l’étude de la littérature, which advocates an ironic pursuit of the unexpectedness of human behaviour. The trinitarian Athanasius – a villain figure ...”

“... attire – has once again mutated. For the inquisitors in 1430-31, cross-dressing contravened the laws of nature and of God and fuelled the most ferociously pursued accusations against her; during many centuries of her subsequent cult, artists overlooked this guise and depicted Joan with long flowing hair, while her armour was moulded to a womanly body and ...”

“... such as Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, as well as theoreticians like Steven Walt and John Mearsheimer, even claimed that a genuine consideration of US interests militated against the war. The mere fact that some politicians misused or abused the principle of national security need not call that principle into question. But when an idea routinely ...”

“... is the closest thing we have to a national industry. King Charles is a private landlord. John Lewis is a private landlord. The homelessness charity St Mungo’s is a private landlord. So are many MPs and, as Ruby found out, doctors.Landlordism has proliferated in tandem with soaring land and property values. A fifth of British homes are currently ...”

“... is a for-profit run by a military contractor, Caliburn International. The anti-immigrant zealot John Kelly – once considered the only ‘adult’ in the White House when he was chief of staff – joined Caliburn’s board immediately after leaving government.*In a televised interview with Vice President Pence, the host reads from an article about the ...”

“... concept was revealed to the world, years later, as the Millennium Dome. But, like his namesake Dr John, the Elizabethan magus and imperial geographer, Simon Dee was exploited by the Secret State and then abandoned to provincial obscurity. Now it can be told: the Dome represents the consciousness of the lost years of Simon Dee. Finally, on Friday 12 ...”

“... US and Britain cope with mass death and the destruction of livelihoods. Covid-19 shattered what John Stuart Mill called ‘the deep slumber of a decided opinion’, forcing many to realise that they live in a broken society, with a carefully dismantled state. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung put it in May, unequal and unhealthy societies are ‘a good breeding ...”