“... Managers and workers jointly resist any attempt from above to extract more effort from them. John Hicks’s dictum that ‘the greatest of all monopoly profits is a quiet life’ may be particularly apt here. Relations between the state enterprise and its immediate political superiors exhibit similar complexity. There is clientelism, in that the ...”

“... we find his basic line of argument taken up by David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, to some degree by John Stuart Mill and even more closely (Berlin might have added) by Henry Sidgwick. This great tradition of classical utilitarianism proved impressively successful at occupying the entire conceptual space, thereby managing to dismiss any rival interpretations as ...”

“... now. So it is that we learn that as an actor Shakespeare played Old Hamlet, Adam, Friar Laurence, John of Gaunt, Henry IV, Egeon and Duncan, but then again perhaps he didn’t, since all we have in support of this claim is a late rumour and some unverifiable computer analysis. Shakespeare’s will seems to confirm a well-established estrangement from not just ...”

“... Nazis, as was the case in most branches of the federal bureaucracy. Its first president, Otto John, had been active in the resistance, escaping to London after the failed putsch of 1944. In 1954 he popped up in East Berlin and revealed in a press conference that the soon-to-be West German Ministry of Defence and the foreign intelligence service that was ...”

“... patriot. The Times praised Helms’s plea, citing the conflict between ‘the need to enforce the laws against lying and the continuing need to keep secrets’. The paper’s ambivalence towards power was reasserting itself. The consequences of Helms’s plea deal, Hersh writes, were calamitous: ‘every CIA officer who took the oath of secrecy was now exempt ...”

“... council agreed to stop auctioning it off; any money it gained from the Right to Buy and similar laws would be used for social housing in the area. In 2019, Renhard, then an Acorn activist, was asked to join Bristol Homes Board, and the council adopted the campaign’s housing charter.Renhard became a councillor in 2021. Just three weeks later, he became the ...”

“... So it comes as a bigger shock than the salmonella scare (Edwina Currie, 1988) or the BSE scare (John Selwyn Gummer, 1990) to hear the latest strand in the table talk: that the era of endless food is winding down.This belief is new. Until recently the discussion was largely about quality. Quantity and availability only entered the picture when we wondered ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... on its behalf, as well as well-connected political insiders: Reagan’s national security adviser John Poindexter, the Clinton strategist James Carville and, later, the disgraced general Mike Flynn, who was Trump’s first national security adviser. Former US government and intelligence officials were hired to fill executive and advisory roles. In 2009, the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”