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“... burden of the Poor Law from local property taxes to the central state. Financing pensions by means of income tax ran the risk of being politically divisive, since it would be redistributive. The alternative was social insurance (Bismarck had introduced such a scheme in Germany in 1889), with a flat-rate contribution from employers and employees, and ...”

“... also wrote the dissent, which is unsigned), and again in a recent abortion case.Ginsburg’s death means that the political centre of the court will now probably settle on Justice Gorsuch. He is a more interesting jurist than liberals at first admitted. He recently wrote the decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, in which the court held that employees are ...”

“... been thought by many, including the government, to form part of customary international law. That means it is binding on all states whatever their treaty commitments. It is not unlawful under domestic law for Parliament to place the UK in breach of international law. But the fact that no domestic court can stop Parliament breaching international law ...”

“... both sides make impassioned appeals to the authority of the recent past: a past within which means tests and prescription charges, Bevanism and Butskellism, visionary utopianism and new realism, all churn together in the popular imagination. Charles Webster’s The Health Services since the War, which translates the folklore of the NHS into carefully ...”

“... Divorcing was reissued by New York Review Books in 2020 with an introduction by Sontag’s son, David Rieff. Lament for Julia is now available for the first time, along with nine of her short stories. Taubes’s fiction is autobiographical. She writes female protagonists who are daughters of psychoanalysts or trapped in fluorescently unhappy marriages or ...”

“... There is a great difference between trying to figure out what a poem means and trying to figure out which interpretation of a poem will contribute to the toppling of patriarchy or to the war effort. Until recently the assertion of this difference would have been superfluous, but in many circles it has come to be an article of faith that the idea of a distinctively literary system of facts and values is at best an illusion and at worst an imposition by the powers that be of an orthodoxy designed to suppress dissent ...”

“... occupied with the achievements of Thomas Cromwell, has never thought biography to be the fitting means of approaching him. Biography now belongs to the margins of historical writing. The economic and sociological determinism of the 20th century has questioned the influence of great men, while its psychological determinism has undermined their dignity. To ...”

“... Nothing is more striking than the ‘immense, unstoppable relish’ with which Picasso puts ‘the means of illusionism through their paces’ for one last time in the paintings from Céret and Sorgues. Why did he do so? In part, he was reacting to the ‘nerveless academicism’ of his own work at Cadaqués. More important, he was testing the ways in which ...”

“... available, well-used moulds. One of these turned up, somewhat oddly, in the New Statesman, where David Selbourne argued that what had been persistently overlooked was the fact that India wasn’t a country at all, but a sub-continent. This thesis has some truth in it, but there hangs about it an ancient and fish-like smell. It was, after all, a standard ...”

“... should be ‘exaltation’, although it is hard to be sure. Referring to ‘the historian David Irving’ is like referring to the metallurgist Uri Geller. There were, I think, few ballpoint pens in 1940. On page 160 the idea that the USA passed straight from barbarism to decadence is praised as if it had been conceived by Muggeridge, instead of Oscar ...”

“... Johns continued with Hopps, ‘and how to add space and still keep it an object painting.’ His means were sometimes simple (a tin cup or an old ruler attached to a canvas), and sometimes complicated: spatial bursts of bright colours stencilled with the names of those colours but in ways that rarely match up. Such developments close out the first decade of ...”

“... craft to folk culture, Catholic to Protestant everyday life. Heaney met the singer and filmmaker David Hammond in the ‘pre-Troubles, upbeat folk scene Belfast of the mid-1960s’; through him, and after the move to Dublin, he ‘got to know a lot of people, north and south, who were involved with traditional music’, among them Garech Browne of Claddagh ...”

“... first-class people to semi-starvation.’ He had in mind the treatment of people like his father, David, who, as Bevan put it, was ‘choked to death’ by pneumoconiosis (a lung condition caused by long-term inhalation of coal dust) but received no compensation since the condition wasn’t classified as an industrial disease under the Workmen’s ...”

“... that ‘the secret’ to Carlsen’s greatness is that ‘it remains a secret,’ whatever that means. During​ the last few weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time watching Carlsen play blitz (five-minute) and bullet (one-minute) chess online. He says he does this to relax and to rejuvenate his ego by thrashing wired bunglers after he’s lost a serious ...”

“... not to LSD, but to politics. All that is now less relevant. Thirty-four years of Left Front rule means that the coalition must take responsibility for various transgressions. Among them are the politicisation of institutions, their alleged infiltration by party members or sympathisers; a recalcitrant work ethic, encouraged by militant trade unions; the awful ...”