“... 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 ...”

“... but himself. If he is in earnest – and if he isn’t we’ll not bother with him, any more than David Trotter does – he thought that he was testing his society by moving out to the periphery of that society, speaking for and with the disaffected, the vagabonds, the ill-adjusted. How disconcerting, then, to find that the disaffection he thought he was ...”

“... and the disciplining of social life. In particular, they demonstrated how the reform of penal laws and institutions enhanced rather than diminished the power of legal authorities and further subordinated deviant individuals and the social classes from which they were drawn. The policing and punishment of offenders ceased to be a social function ever more ...”

“... and the life and death of particular kings (whose powers were limited by certain ‘fundamental laws’). Until the burial, the new king remained out of sight while an effigy of his predecessor, holding the symbols of sovereignty, was waited upon, talked to, and even served meals. Only at the actual burial did the successor reveal himself, and even then, he ...”

“... by the fleur-de-lys flag), foiled royalist hopes. In 1875, the Assembly passed constitutional laws that avoided the word ‘republic’, except to describe the extensive powers of a ‘president of the republic’, who could easily be replaced by a dynastic monarch.It was political contingency, specifically an ill-advised dissolution of the Chamber of ...”

“... tradition of Tory thinking about public transport. It was in the same genre as the rumour – even David McKie has been unable to turn up a precise source – that Margaret Thatcher once remarked that anyone who rode a bus after reaching the age of 26 was a failure. It also reminded me of a story Ken Livingstone liked to recite when he was leader of the ...”

“... the way developments in algorithmic warfare have transformed Israeli military operations.I met David (names have been changed throughout) in June at a café in West Jerusalem. He had volunteered for reserve duty in the Israeli intelligence corps a few days after the 7 October attacks. Many Israelis are one degree of separation from someone ...”

“... ninth wrangler and was already well disposed to discovering mathematically-expressed natural laws in domains where the pertinence of such laws hadn’t previously been suspected. At the end of the 18th century, the average age at marriage for English men was around 26. Malthus’s own marriage was prudently postponed ...”

“... Too late, David Copperfield realises that he has married an imbecile: Dora is good-looking and affectionate, but she’s useless with a cookery book and incapable of managing servants. She calls her husband ‘Doady’ and begs him to accept that she can never be more to him than a ‘child-wife’. Worst of all, she will never be able to appreciate his genius ...”

“... she expressed a personal conviction on a question of constitutional law in the past decade.’ David Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist, gets it right: ‘She seems to be smart, impressive and honest – and in her willingness to suppress so much of her mind for the sake of her career, kind of disturbing.’ Whatever her own views may ...”

“... science’ – the modern science of the mind, and of possible minds. The idea that there might be laws of thought transcending our intelligence is rooted in antiquity; Aristotelian logic was long regarded as a statement of such laws, and in modern times the mathematical logician feels free to ignore the feebleness of human ...”

“... society which enables it to set aside the majority feeling in favour of hanging, anti-homosexual laws, rescinding state payments to hippies. If it comes to that, there would probably still be a majority in this country in favour of the Lord Chamberlain’s rules on the theatre. There are ways round this in a pluralistic society, but in a monolithic one the ...”

“... Theodora and attendants, from a sixth-century mosaic in the Basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna David Potter’s contribution to the series is a life of the sixth-century Byzantine empress Theodora, the wife of Justinian, who ruled the eastern Roman provinces from Constantinople for almost forty years. Justinian had been a soldier from Illyrian peasant ...”

“... means. Judged from this standpoint, it is the Jews who stayed loyal to their faith, their laws and their race whose lives and history must be celebrated, while those who married out or opted out are to be condemned. These two interpretations are as impossible to reconcile in relation to the Anglo-Jewish past as they are in relation to the Anglo-Jewish ...”

“... that my body must be the one which is located at the place from which what I see would by the laws of optics be seen. The point is not that I am a body rather than a mind, but that, if no use is made of my body, I have no criterion of identity. Berkeley would protest that I can identify my body in his system, because it has been mentalised as a particular ...”