“... value-laden and partial. The second, more penetrating objection was that the aspiration to devise laws and public policies that were neutral towards competing conceptions of the good life was itself not neutral but rather affirmed the good of individual choice. By seeking to remain neutral, the state (and teachers, parents, friends and so on) gave wide ...”

“... role in government than its namesake in the UK. Unlike its British equivalent, it can strike down laws it finds unconstitutional. Events in America’s recent history have magnified the court’s profile; its partisan contortions in favour of George W. Bush in the case of Bush v. Gore decided the 2000 presidential election. But nothing has done more to push ...”

“... the punishment for high treason was to be hanged, drawn and quartered. While other treason laws had come and gone, the 1351 statute remained the sole law defining high treason in England, and since the Act of Union it had also been the law in Scotland. The statute was generally agreed to be ‘declaratory’: that is to say, it was intended not to ...”

“... The best summation of the importance of naval position was given in 1904 by the British admiral John Fisher: ‘Five keys lock up the world! Singapore, the Cape, Alexandria, Gibraltar, Dover. These five keys belong to England.’ But if you leave strategic bases aside, it is often the show of naval force, rather than its application, that has proved most ...”

“... wrote in a piece about the City of London, in the aftermath of the Northern Rock fiasco: ‘If our laws are not extended to control the new kinds of super-powerful, super-complex and potentially super-risky investment vehicles, they will one day cause a financial disaster of global-systemic proportions.’* The prediction was right, but the tense was ...”

“... Alabama boycotted the city’s public transport system after Rosa Parks defied Jim Crow laws by refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. Leading the protests was Martin Luther King. In the aftermath of the Montgomery bus boycott, King established the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, using black churches as the base for organising ...”

“... simply; even the distinction I have just made fails to dispel the suspicion of liberal partiality. John Rawls’s reputation is built on his monumental A Theory of Justice, published in 1971. But in later years, he not only refined the details of his account of justice as fairness; he also reconstructed its mode of presentation so that it might illuminate and ...”

“... doctrine definitively trumpeted by Milton and Locke, and knocked into some sort of final shape by John Stuart Mill? Even before you get to today’s remix of the debate, you cannot help noticing two features of it. First, the zealots today are no longer the progressives on the left – liberals, socialists, trade unionists. Instead they are predominantly on ...”

“... this exaltation of the female sex to that honour, consequence and independence, which European laws studied to uphold.’ In 1848, John Mitchell Kemble, in one of the top three, assured (reassured?) Queen Victoria that ‘woman among the Teutons was near akin to divinity, but not one among them ever raved that the femme ...”

“... on Human Rights). In 2004 Peter Hain, then the Labour Leader of the House of Commons, introduced laws designed to curb anti-war protests in Parliament Square. The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, aimed at the Iraq War protester Brian Haw, included a ban on using tents, sleeping bags and megaphones in the square. In the debate in the Lords last ...”

“... of illegitimate children’. Abortion-seeking Texans usually travelled to states with more liberal laws, or to Mexico, but Roe claimed, and there seemed no reason to doubt her, that she couldn’t afford to leave town. She understood that some doctors in Dallas did perform illegal abortions, but these were expensive and often unsafe, and she worried that ...”

“... boring Holloway to good old Peckham on the south side of the river, nearer the centre of things. John Jensen’s illustrations match Weedon Grossmith’s very neatly. Carrie thought the Pooters’ house rather too near the railway line, and deemed her husband’s jolly friend, Gowing, a touch too bibulous: to express her point of view, Jensen has embellished ...”

“... Curiously, the first historian to query this complacent picture was the future arch-Eurosceptic, John Redwood, in his Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England 1660-1750 (1976). This told the story of the assault on orthodox Christianity launched during the Augustan age by a variegated cast of libertine rakes, deists and heterodox ...”

“... emphasised the natural rights of the people to remove a tyrant who would reduce them to servitude. John Locke, whose work was not immediately influential but had by the 1740s become a vital prop of the Whig regime, upheld the classical definition of liberty as independence. The work of Algernon Sidney, another Whig icon, who was executed by Charles II in ...”

“... The last two years, in which capitalism has suffered one of its periodic shocks, have given John Maynard Keynes a new lease of life. Events have demonstrated the limits of the theory that economies can be relied on to be stable if they are lightly regulated and otherwise left to themselves. There is now much talk of the paradox of thrift, whereby the rational choices of individuals can prove collectively ruinous, and of the need for government to counteract the inherently anarchic tendencies of markets ...”