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“... the story moves in a deeply satisfying trajectory – a trajectory described according to the laws of four-dimensional geometry, perhaps. This sense of moving in accord with an unfamiliar logic is what Ozick shares with Bruno Schulz. Schulz was one of the strangest writers who ever lived, but the stories in his two books (all of which take place in a ...”

“... us would think that a beheading is a far greater threat than a sunburn.’ They could have picked John Kasich, a former Congressman and Fox News host, currently governor of Ohio. Known throughout his career as a phlegmatic and abusive man, widely disliked in Congress, he underwent an image makeover for the presidential campaign. He became, in his own words, a ...”

“... that this lethal practice flourished here in pre-Christian times derives from the ancient Irish Laws which recognised and strove to regulate the rite of ‘fasting against a person of exalted state in order to enforce a claim against him’. This elegantly succinct definition I take from the long essay entitled ‘Irish History and Irish Law’ by Dr Daniel ...”

“... become the world’s first trillionaire. That means he will be worth a thousand billionaires. As John Allen Paulos demonstrated in his book Innumeracy, most of us have a poor grasp of what numbers on this scale mean; so take a second to guess, intuitively, what you think the difference in time is between a million seconds and a billion seconds. Ready? A ...”

“... moment was perhaps the publication, while Skinner was an undergraduate, of a scholarly edition of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government by Peter Laslett. Laslett showed how radically Locke’s text had been misunderstood because of the ignorance of political scientists about, and their indifference to, the circumstances and aims of its ...”

“... neo-conservative of the 1980s, but his successors may well go far beyond him, striking down laws protecting workers and the environment, supporting the destruction of basic civil liberties in the war on terrorism, and engaging in a wholesale attack on the premises of 20th-century constitutionalism. Or then again, Bush may hesitate. Despite his professed ...”

“... in San Francisco published a pamphlet taking issue with claims made by California’s governor, John Bigler, who had characterised the state’s 7520 Chinese migrants as servile ‘coolies’ undercutting white workers. ‘The poor Chinaman does not come here as a slave,’ Tong Achick and Chun Aching wrote in An Analysis of the Chinese Question. ‘He ...”

“... the head inspires discussions of mental illness, hairstyles, beheading, and the rival relics of John the Baptist’s head. Under the rubric of skin, Hartnell ad-dresses flaying, leprosy, plastic surgery, racial difference and manuscripts – for, as others have pointed out, most of what we know about the premodern past is written on the skins of dead ...”

“... against serious ill-treatment has not inhibited the brutal anti-immigrant and anti-asylum laws of recent years, but it has given some protection to the persecuted, the impoverished and the tortured, who would otherwise have been removed from this country without even a chance to associate their plight with any kind of legal argument. In 2002, the ...”

“... to marry them. In Lichfield, the geographical centre of Middle England, a statue of Captain Edward John Smith of the Titanic stands in a park bestowing dangerous blessings on newly-wed couples emerging from the nearby register office. In McKie’s version of England the past is generally not allowed to assert itself as a moral yardstick, a measure of decline ...”

“... on this occasion were the rioters themselves, killed by troops, or by gentleman volunteers like John Wilkes, or by the raw alcohol they looted from Catholic-owned distilleries. Food rioters, too, only rarely inflicted serious injury on the farmers, shopkeepers and middlemen whose prices they protested against. And industrial rioters were far more likely to ...”

“... John Robert Seeley was Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge between Kingsley and Acton. One of the few eminent Victorians who inspired no memorial biography, he was best remembered as the author of The Expansion of England (1883), a sweeping historical manifesto in favour of the unification of the British Empire ...”

“... Volvo trucks while intoning ‘a body crafted to perfection, a pair of legs engineered to defy the laws of physics, a mind set to master the most epic of spaces’. Mostly, however, what characterises this version of manhood is that it is completely incapable of parodying, or even seeing, itself. It was the genius of the women who played the parts of men at ...”

“... that gave an illusion of argument rather than the substance. The region also preserved some local laws, not least to do with hunting, which were at odds with France’s national legal code, and all the more fiercely protected for that. More controversial was the war cemetery with its rows of white and black crosses: white for those who had died fighting for ...”

“... be given from outside, determined by the way things actually are in the world, or by the generic laws of vraisemblance. It would, I think, have been good if The Siren’s Song had included more of what Blanchot wrote about fiction in the late Forties and Fifties. The great question to which he addressed himself was the one to which other like-minded ...”