“... the sovereign as the law-making authority, unlimited and indivisible. Following Hobbes, but by no means acknowledging him, the 18th-century debate started from the premise that Parliament, the legislature, was the supreme body in the state. It had emerged victorious over its old rivals; its law was the supreme form of law and could override other forms; the ...”

“... political body, ‘the essence of personhood’. The normal word for ‘beautiful’, kalos, also means ‘noble and good’ – think of all those cards at Kensington Palace describing Diana as ‘a beautiful person’ and you are getting close to the confusion of categories. The normal word for ‘ugly’, aischros, also ...”

“... I turned up on the first day. Then his manager announced that I was the oga’s ‘friend’ (oga means ‘chief’ or ‘boss’): the old school tie counts as much in Nigeria as anywhere else. Agbaje, who was standing for the third time, tends to surface only six months ahead of an election. As I followed his campaign I found it hard to see just where, or ...”

“... She believes that Gödel’s theorems were designed to refute the formalist programme of David Hilbert, according to which mathematics is just an arbitrary human creation, ‘a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper’. Wrong, wrong, wrong! But we can see how Goldstein was misled. There is no doubt that the ...”

“... During the break-up with Kimberly Quinn that precipitated his break-up with the Home Office, David Blunkett is reported to have warned her: ‘The law is on my side. I know because I made the law.’ It doesn’t quite have the melodramatic chill of Judge Dredd’s ‘I am the law,’ but it comes close. And it’s easy to imagine Blunkett saying it, for it nicely sums up the tragically self-important view he took of himself, and of the executive branch of government, during his time in office ...”

“... were heterodox, then, does not mean that he pursued questions that his contemporaries did not; it means that he arrived at some minority positions on issues that were continually and fervently discussed. To praise Milton, as Wittreich does, as a poet of contradiction misses the fact that he did his utmost to avoid contradictions; it is rather like praising an ...”

“... government was good insofar as it enabled individual and religious liberty, the form taken by the means to that end did not really matter. As a result Milton is to be distinguished from Nedham by his relatively consistent commitment to a set of ethical and religious ends, even if the means he saw to realise those ends ...”

“... between the two, both in perception and in action, is typically ‘indirect’, where that means something like ‘mediated by thought’. But plausible as that may seem, the thesis of Andy Clark’s new book, Supersizing the Mind, is that the mind v. world dualism is untenable. The best way through Clark’s book is to start by reading the foreword by ...”

“... teacher Leopold Kronecker reviled it as ‘humbug’ and ‘mathematical insanity’, whereas David Hilbert declared: ‘No one shall expel us from the paradise that Cantor has created for us.’ Bertrand Russell recalled in his autobiography that he ‘falsely supposed’ all Cantor’s ‘arguments to be fallacious’, only later realising that ‘all ...”

“... Brown and to which, Downing Street tells us, he remains committed. But given what the deterrent means to the country’s political class – the international standing they imagine it gives them – it is unlikely that a Cameron government would do away with it, whatever the expense.If value for money is the concern, Cameron could easily take an axe to the ...”

“... Murdoch’s descriptive prose: ‘A memory came back to her from her Italian journey, the young David of Donatello, casual, powerful, superbly naked, and charmingly immature.’ And no one could read more than a couple of her novels without recognising that they usually take place in summer, often in a large house, and rarely shift their gaze significantly ...”

“... for a country undergoing political upheaval is a messy and dangerous business, and it is by no means guaranteed to succeed. We think of South Africa in the early 1990s as a heartening example. ‘A relatively conservative Afrikaner leader decided to negotiate before he had lost,’ the journalist Colin Eglin said, ‘and an imprisoned leader of a ...”

“... of heightened religious excitement. This is a problem for those who see religion primarily as a means of social control. Revivals far outnumber the incipient political revolutions they are supposed to frustrate, and perpetual revival appears to be sustainable in a way that permanent revolution is not. One testing ground for theories about the relationship ...”

“... imperial centre disposed of such naval strength that it could prevent by military-administrative means any terminal localisation – a condition only made possible by the technological innovations of 17th-century Europe. Two further conditions suggest themselves: first, that the trans-oceanic migration be on a sufficiently formidable scale that the migrants ...”

“... arranged review coverage for his friends’ books – much of it written by himself, though by no means as mere puffing – and he advised on or actually negotiated contracts for Bulwer, Douglas Jerrold, Hood, Mrs Gaskell, Landor and, of course, Dickens. Like Lewes, Forster also did what it would have been open to him to do at any period: he intervened in the ...”