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“... but as home secretary he came into his own.One of Sidmouth’s spies, a man called John Castle, was on the action committee responsible for organising the huge and supposedly peaceful meeting of reformers on Spa Fields that was to be addressed by the mellifluous Orator Hunt. Castle tirelessly whipped up the labourers who had just been laid off ...”

“... outlet for wrongful publication after the event. It is the second of these that our defamation laws are concerned with. Newspapers and other media seek legal advice, balance the risk, take a chance here, are caught out there, settle, apologise, pay damages if all else fails. Even if a case reaches court and the defendant draws a Hutton, an appeal can ...”

“... have posed to the Conservative electoral juggernaut at the 2015 election. Nick Clegg and David Laws would have done better to reflect on the lessons of the 1880s. If free-market pro-EU Liberals had fought the 2015 election as a small but boisterous and essential entity within a Cameron-led coalition, on the model of the Liberal Unionists after 1886, it is ...”

“... therefore, may follow from the decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the laws of England; and therefore the black must be discharged.’ Although the decision had been long anticipated by that of Holt, history – encouraged by a strong abolitionist lobby, which found it useful to elevate Mansfield’s reluctant judgment into a new ...”

“... Grave’. It leads to a blunt stone plinth with a round boulder on top and a plaque commemorating John Flynn (1880-1951), a Presbyterian minister who was sent by his church to the Northern Territory in 1912 to investigate conditions in the bush. His report was grim, describing poor communications and scant healthcare. In 1928, with the pedal-powered radio ...”

“... of 1665, Sabbatai was declaring that, as the messiah, he was no longer bound by Jewish ritual and laws; he changed a fast day into a feast on the grounds that although it commemorated the fall of the First and Second Temple, it was also his own birthday. He started eating forbidden food in public and giving women a leading role in religious services. Over the ...”

“... rarely floated nationalist solutions to their problems. The slogan ‘English votes for English laws’ strikes a discordant note in the dominant melody of English history. It’s not that the English have been immune to chauvinism or national mythologising. Since the later Middle Ages at least – and arguably for much longer – they have enjoyed a strong ...”

“... These biographies of John Gielgud by Jonathan Croall and Sheridan Morley are quite hard to tell apart. They are of much the same size, bear handsome pictures of the actor in old age on the front of their dust-jackets, and are, inevitably, affectionate and indulgent towards their subject. As Dirk Bogarde remarked when Croall consulted him about the work in hand, ‘everybody adored him, so the book might make rather flat reading ...”

“... how Gorbachev reintroduced a series of reforms in the latter half of the Eighties, known as the Laws of Enterprises and Cooperatives, which gave managers the right to make ‘independent’ decisions, so long as they conformed to the plan, and small co-operatives the right to engage in petty business ventures that posed no challenge to state ...”

“... then as now, were bursting at the seams with prisoners scooped up by the mindless severity of the laws protecting property. There being no provision for life imprisonment for those reprieved from the hangman, transportation to the other side of the planet was devised. The other explanation for the expedition (which Keneally seems to favour) suggests that the ...”

“... is proceeding on overwhelmingly creative and, on balance, encouraging lines. Change is the law of laws and has been from the start (supposing there needed to be one), change not in the slow realisation of some preordained plan – Bergson is not a finalist – but as a transcendent, suprarational force whose effects are to be observed in ‘the continuous ...”

“... market liberalism advocated in The Orange Book (2004), a collection of essays coedited by David Laws that included contributions by Chris Huhne, Vince Cable and Clegg himself. The aim of the contributors was to reaffirm a version of liberalism they believed had been lost: one in which support for small government and the free market goes with a strong ...”

“... sister Joanna (or Martha – the name is in doubt) were the youngest of ten daughters of the late John Taaffe of Smarmore Castle, Co. Louth. At the ages of 26 and 30 respectively, they have been despatched to Rome by the current head of the family, their half-brother, another John Taaffe, to visit a distant kinsman, Lord ...”

“... of the scholarly pretences of his fellow economists and of all manner of other balderdash, John Kenneth Galbraith’s only reticence hides a skilfully disguised but intense puritanism. He may not suffer the classic puritan’s agonies at the thought that somebody, somewhere is having a good time, but if contentment is a goal for the rest of us, it is ...”

“... of all religious groups which accept that their role is to persuade their members to obey the laws of the state. Spinoza’s Tractatus-Theologico Politicus, which most likely grew out of his unpublished answer to the Synagogue, starts by arguing that there is no special religious knowledge, neither by prophecy nor miracles. The purported Providential ...”