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“... she could still earn a handsome living. But the profligacy of her first-born children and their in-laws meant she soon found herself unexpectedly and heavily in debt. Fearful of arrest, with her energy flagging and her health failing, she fled the country in August 1815, and went into exile in France. Ill, impoverished and friendless, she was dead within less ...”

“... in the world. Her Communist Party is, and always has been, electorally insignificant. By all the laws of political sociology, she ought to be a super-Sweden – as accustomed to Labour governments as Sweden is to Social Democratic ones. In 1945, Labour seemed to have entered its sociological inheritance. In 1951, it polled the biggest popular vote ever ...”

“... according to which one’s obligations to the dead are valued above one’s obligations to the laws of the state, which would designate them as enemies. (He invokes both Hegel’s account of Antigone and Anthony Giddens’s argument for a politics founded in the norms of familial and civil society.) The remarkable thing about the ghosts of the American War ...”

“... had, so long as they demean themselves peaceably and quietly with due obedience to His Majesty’s laws and without scandal to his government’, a condition which they had no difficulty in meeting. Similar orders were issued in 1674 and 1685, and in 1700 Solomon de Medina became the first Jew to receive an English knighthood. In ...”

“... builders of Chernobyl? For the Kariba North Bank power station, however, there is now a memorial-David Morrell’s Indictment. Mr Morrell is the chairman of Mitchell Construction, the original contractors for the KNB project, and his book breaks ground unturned since Samuel Smiles’s Lives of the Engineers. In his pages, Mitchell Construction, in legal ...”

“... Good Book says, come to us all. We all know that each of us will soon disappear from the Earth. David Raup’s book compounds our pessimism by pointing out that – if humans are anything like other animals – the fate awaiting our species as a whole is also an almost certain annihilation. Very few creatures persist for long in evolutionary time. There are ...”

“... were remarkable, the adult cast a dream, and they have heart and wit on their side. Produced by David Heyman, who went on with Rosie Alison to make the hit Paddington movies, they raised the bar for live-action family entertainment. But they are big-budget motion pictures: tap them and they ring like money. Great children’s fiction isn’t slick; the film ...”

“... a creature of Zardari’s, has declared that anyone trying to tamper with or amend the blasphemy laws will be dealt with severely. In the New York Times version he said he would shoot any blasphemer himself. Taseer’s spirited defence of Asiya Bibi, a 45-year-old Punjabi Christian peasant, falsely charged with blasphemy after an argument with two women who ...”

“... which in turn encouraged participation in more formal imperialism. Even the repeal of the Corn Laws – the flagship of Free Trade policy – had double-edged consequences. For, by finally signalling the abandonment of self-sufficiency, it emphasised our dependence on food imports, and so made the Navy the main guarantor of food supply, which led in turn ...”

“... the abominable to the merely unsavoury.In the case of Holocaust denial – the crime for which David Irving was sentenced to three years in prison and banned from returning to Austria – the fear of contagion in some countries is based on rational horror instructed by recent experience. That is the argument for making an exception to the belief that the ...”

“... endorsement or override, and who was forbidden to suspend or dispense with its legislation: ‘The laws shall not be altered, suspended, abrogated or repealed, nor any new law made, nor any tax, charge or imposition laid upon the people, but by common consent in Parliament.’ The debt of the 1689 Bill of Rights to the Instrument of Government (which itself ...”

“... his Irishness, but the editors of this new edition of Goldsmith’s letters, Michael Griffin and David O’Shaughnessy, urge its importance, and they are surely right. Some of the ideas that persistently recur in Goldsmith’s work – opposition to imperialism, scepticism about English notions of liberty – seem to be manifestations of his nationality. He ...”

“... in preference to individual diversity, in the (usually vain) hope of discovering some historical laws of circumstantial determinism. In another, it has been resurrected as psychohistory, which seeks greater intellectual respectability by becoming evidentially more sensational, probing the intimate details of men’s inner lives as lived in their bedrooms and ...”

“... the mood took him, an advocate of cool. In Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude, Dick Pountain and David Robins define cool as a ‘new secular virtue’ – the official language of a private or subcultural rebelliousness retuned from generation to generation, as well as of worldwide commodity fetishism. According to Alan Liu, in The ...”

“... there, in a sense.’ ‘Perhaps we should think about Scotland in the same way,’ the playwright David Greig said. ‘Perhaps Scotland has always been independent, but we were just unable to see it.’ Where is Scotland, anyway? That question isn’t about geography. Where does it exist most intensely? In football? In culture? In the past? In its music? The ...”