“... series of Rothkos in 1958-9. Weight and Measure confirms with exceptional power certain familiar laws pertaining to the functioning of the energy which seems to be contained in great sculpture. First, that the energy emanating from certain forms, while not measurable by any instrument, has effects on an observer’s nervous system which appear as real to ...”

“... discussions of world history and politics, which read more like Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws than an officer’s manual. In Napoleon’s personal entourage, too, soldier-poets were anything but unusual. Guillaume-Marie-Anne Brune, born the son of a provincial lawyer in 1763, went to Paris to study law, but found work as a typesetter after his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... wearing a fashionable suit, an embroidered waistcoat, silk breeches and lace cuffs. Sumptuary laws were still on the books, but by then they were not enforced. The only transgressions that were still punished were male-female cross-dressing and the illicit wearing of swords – but the latter rule existed more to prevent violence than to protect a noble ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... harsh and inviolable. Even Wilson’s feisty subject timed her pleasures to its unalterable rhythm.David Henkin sets out to discover how Americans became such creatures of the seven-day week. By the time the United States was founded as an independent republic, he writes, North Americans were already ‘by the contemporary standards of Europe … particularly ...”

“... recorded by the French-Mauritian chronicler Nicolas Mayeur in 1806 and reproduced in the late David Graeber’s Pirate Enlightenment, called for gun flints, lead balls, gunpowder and river water to be mixed in an upturned shield with the point of a knife, the draught then taken with ginger soaked in the blood of the oath-takers. Mayeur, a retired slave ...”

“... United Kingdom, Madagascar) and archipelagic states (Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines). David Bosco opens his account of ocean governance with the question of the Senkaku Islands, eight uninhabited rocks between Taiwan and Okinawa which are in themselves no good to anyone but are nonetheless bitterly contested. Under US occupation from 1945, when ...”

“... mind in Whitehall because, while it is implied throughout his absorbing and well-researched book, David Leigh has refrained from going into the historical origins of Whitehall’s almost pathological obsession with secrecy. A young investigative journalist, with a healthy distaste for oligarchy in a country which boasts too much about its imagined heritage of ...”

“... government to power.’ (Nor a Labour one, for that matter; the turning point for me came when David Miliband claimed that they’d been ‘punished enough’ for the Iraq War: ‘Well, you haven’t actually been voted out of office,’ I growled.) The gloom quickly gave way to a sense of the advantages. For a start the voters might have fallen a little ...”

“... valley’s first major firm, Hewlett-Packard, was a military contractor. One of its co-founders, David Packard, was an undersecretary of defence in the Nixon administration; his signal contribution as a civil servant was a paper about overriding the laws preventing the imposition of martial law. Many defence contractors ...”

“... exclusive use within the United States, but networks are governed by mathematical, not sovereign, laws. Society conceived as a network isn’t about aggregates or averages, but is a complex system through which trends, behaviours, memes, information and infections travel. There is nothing distinctively human or political about the ...”

“... propounding of the rule that finders may not be keepers is at the start of Book XI of Plato’s Laws, a work which discusses, in relentless detail, the laws that should govern an imaginary new colony to be founded on Crete. Under the general principle ‘Thou shalt not touch or move my possessions without my ...”

“... and the good.Simón’s self-appointed task in the new life is to look after a small boy, David, who, he thinks, lost a document that would lead him to his mother on the boat over. (The details aren’t clear thanks to ‘the waters of forgetting’, in which people speak repeatedly of being ‘washed clean’.) In time, Simón becomes convinced that ...”

“... of virginity: he wishes to extend the meaning of the word ‘virgin’ to mean ‘outside the laws of man’, like the virgin forest, so free and prodigal. He draws the Bible-reading Pratt to a consideration of the genealogy of the Virgin Mary. St Matthew, alleges Dr Psex, mentions only four women in this list of fathers and sons – and all four were ...”