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“... thoughts of Johnson, relieved that Kennedy has been assassinated in Florida: ‘Imagine if he’d been killed in Texas. I’d be suspect number one.’ Although several novelists have used the Kennedy assassination as a means of exploring the underside of American society, assassination fiction remains a variant of the ...”

“... markets, especially before and during the draws: the loan came from the purchase by the well-to-do of expensive tickets, some of which carried special prizes, and all of which entitled the bearer to an annuity. England’s financial revolution enabled this formerly middle-ranking power to emerge as a dominant player in international relations, but it was by ...”

“... market-driven Conservatism we have known since the Thatcher era. Indeed, in asserting that ‘we do not believe in untrammelled free markets,’ it openly rejected Thatcherite certainties. But after this startling anti-laissez-faire manifesto, which was blamed by many for nearly losing the election, the campaign descended, as Timothy acknowledges, into ...”

“... Most​ UK-based academics who don’t work at Oxford or Cambridge have at some stage experienced the turbulence of university restructuring. In my case, it happened at the University of Glasgow in 2009. The twenty or so departments and research units in the Faculty of Arts were told to reconfigure themselves as four multidisciplinary super-schools ...”

“... communitarians of the wishful thinking they themselves detect in a spent liberalism. Against can-do optimism of the sort which infects even the hardheaded programme set out in Amitai Etzioni’s The Spirit of Community, Ferguson was inoculated threefold. He was, first, a self-conscious Newtonian, concerned to substitute an intense observation of the moral ...”

“... surrounded by an indifferent, if not actively hostile, Catholic population, they could presumably do little harm. In the winter of 1733-4 the cause célèbre in English Court politics was the question of whether Thomas Rundle, another of Queen Caroline’s favourites, would win preferment to the see of Gloucester. In the end, his heterodoxy was deemed too ...”

“... practical questions about when, after moments of rebellion or usurpation, it was proper to give de facto allegiance to a newly ‘settled’ government; and historical arguments about the preservation of the ancient English constitution. The term ‘contract’ did surface in political usage, but not in the Lockean sense; it was more often used in ...”

“... The​ issue of losers’ consent has come sharply into focus in recent decades, most obviously in the US presidential elections of 2000 and 2020, but also closer to home: how many Remainers immediately accepted the democratic verdict of the Brexit vote, and moved on? In Northern Irish politics a perverse variant of this phenomenon obtains: the problem of winners’ consent ...”

“... far from a dystopia. Rather, vice ‘nursed ingenuity’ in every quarter, and ‘Luxury/Employ’d a million of the poor.’ Fickleness and fashion in diet, furniture and dress constitute ‘the very wheel that turn’d the trade’. No profession, calling or craft, including medicine and the Church, ‘was without ...”

“... From the earliest days of the republic the practice has been for congressional tellers to do the counting, with the vice president little more than a master of ceremonies. An election, Lessig and Seligman insist, ‘cannot be reversed by the unilateral action of the vice president’.The purported vice-presidential powers over the count went ...”

“... worlds. Behind Gibbon’s vision of the Old World, Pocock shows, was the French Orientalist Joseph De Guignes’s Histoire générale des Huns, des Turcs, des Mogols et des autres Tartares occidentaux (1756-58). Notwithstanding the prevailing legend that the story of Oriental despotism was one of stasis and torpor, ...”

“... Reform Select Committee of the House of Commons issued a report in March last year titled Do We Need a Constitutional Convention for the UK? The Liberal Democrats’ Home Rule and Community Rule Commission has advocated ‘home rule all round’ in a new federal union. A similar call has come from David Melding, the Conservative deputy presiding ...”

“... right’ and associated ideas – advanced during the Enlightenment by the abbé de St Pierre, Christian Wolff, Jeremy Bentham and others – about how a global society, a civitas maxima, might be established and maintained. The construction of a perpetual peace on this scale would not be possible without treating the coarse timber of an all ...”

“... commitment to impartiality entirely override my duties as a citizen. I tried as far as possible to do what a historian should do, to understand the motivations of people on both sides of the debate, including those who favoured Scottish independence; but the potential risks were so great, and the cheerleading for ...”

“... Fabians attended by George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb, Attlee whispered to his brother: ‘Do we have to grow a beard to join this show?’ The confident pre-1914 left, he later reflected, had been too rigid in its scientific approach to social problems and altogether ‘too Webby’. Socialist eggheads remained a source of exasperation into the late ...”