“... its dust-jacket) there is a good colour illustration of a self-portrait and still-life painted by David Bailly of Leiden in 1651. A young artist (is it too ingenious to suggest that it represents Bailly himself as a young man?) holds Bailly’s portrait on a table where a wide variety of other works of art appear together with a candle, a skull, an hourglass ...”

“... forms. Struggling with these weighty powers, the poems slow down. Robertson’s work by no means avoids the bustling life of cities, but it is marked by a negative reaction to that life. The poems seem to be reacting to a wound of some kind (there are frequent accounts of mutilation and bodily disintegration) for which rural ways are a partial ...”

“... a perspective which recalled the days in which feats of organisation were revered by Labour as a means of securing votes. Here was a political arcadia in which dozens of local parties could boast more than two thousand members, at least a tenth of whom could be relied upon to help rally the faithful when elections came. He blamed the declining faith in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... only just, on the side of those who rejected the proposition that sexual intercourse was simply a means of producing children. His relations with the opposite sex were ostensibly platonic and more than a little confused. On the other hand, he became solemnly interested in issues such as the ‘native question’, with a painstakingly balanced observation of ...”

“... that the lawyers regard Dicey as a Great Brain.) The problem with the Rule of Law is that it means very little if the executive can make up the law as it goes along. Ewing and Gearty show this happening continually in the interwar period. People were harassed, premises raided, harmless citizens arrested and imprisoned, meetings banned, crowds beaten ...”

“... in Cambridge for nearly forty years, but the nature of his publishing and readership history means that this collected poems is as much a launch as a consolidation. His first collection, and the only one to appear from a mainstream publisher until now, was Force of Circumstance (1962), a book that reads like a culmination (which in a sense it is, since ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... invention of powered flight is so familiar that it’s easy to think we know all about it. David McCullough’s excellent biography The Wright Brothers brings the story back to life with facts that the non-specialist either doesn’t know or has blotted out with a misplaced broad brush. Yeah yeah, we get it: the brothers were provincial tinkerers who ...”

“... said that unless the German army withdrew it would mean war. ‘Broken-hearted I begged David Margesson to do something but he was determined. “It must be war, Chips, old boy.”’ When the declaration came the following morning, Channon felt that ‘our old world or all that remains of it, is committing suicide, whilst Stalin laughs.’But for ...”

“... for the fourth time in its brief history, to prevent the resignation of the first minister, David Trimble. Just over a year later, on 26 November 2003, the much postponed Assembly election took place, with the DUP and Sinn Féin emerging as the largest parties, gaining ground from moderate unionists and nationalists. A review of the working of the Good ...”

“... The problematic issue was correlation, which is at the core of evaluating a CDO. Low correlation means that defaults are essentially idiosyncratic events, with the consequence that only the bottommost tranche of a typical CDO is at significant risk. High correlation means that if defaults happen they tend to cluster, and ...”

“... in all but a few countries of which India, Mexico and Nigeria are examples. And this is by no means the whole liturgy of woes that can be recited by those who believe in the value of a free and independent press. The decline in the influence and independence of the mass media is just one aspect of a general malaise affecting our democratic ...”