“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... on gun freedom: 60 per cent of Americans, when surveyed, are in favour of stricter gun control laws, but you wouldn’t know it from a congressman’s call log. On its website, the NRA advises members not to threaten the politicians they telephone, and to be careful about identifying themselves as members of the NRA, since ‘unfortunately, many anti-gun ...”

“... where the paranormal is staged as the ordinary and the imagination is freed from the familiar laws of gravity. Here, in the (to us) remote corners of the undeveloped or developing world, the colours, smells and flavours are more intense, life is more meaningful and death less absolute than in the grey industrial or post-industrial landscapes of the ...”