“... 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 Unlike other Nazi laws, this was not repealed at the end of the war.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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”