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“... on to accuse the English of betraying their precious inheritance. The rot began, he said, with John Stuart Mill, who started off as a liberal but went on to swallow a toxic draught of German metaphysics and then succumbed to the feminist wiles of Harriet Taylor, who married him and led him astray. Under Taylor’s tutelage, it seems, Mill ‘slid slowly ...”

“... Qabbala, or even claim to have inspected and made sense of the symbolism of the Revelations of St John of Patmos. Dukes was also sexually attracted to Stone – or Stone had been born yesterday if Dukes was not. Dukes had terribly vulnerable eyes which when they were hurt would fade over and grow misted with an affecting desolation. It takes a desperate man ...”

“... Hannen, President of the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division of the Court of Appeal; and Sir John Day and Sir Archibald Levin Smith, both from the High Court: ‘Unionists to a man,’ as Roy Jenkins describes them in his Life of Gladstone. But what were these judges thinking of, presiding over a tribunal to which none of the ordinary rules applied, set ...”

“... in the Falklands War earlier that year. The unions’ postwar heyday was already over. Further laws followed in 1984, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1990 and 1992. Often euphemistically called Employment Acts, the new laws first restricted or ended the unions’ most expansive powers: the closed shop, which made union membership ...”

“... and teachers. Not since the publication of the central texts of the modern history of slavery, John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom in 1947 and Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution in 1956, has any serious history book claimed that slavery was a benign paternalistic institution. No one has argued that it was anything other than the great ...”

“... awash with Dante translations: Laurence Binyon’s in the Thirties, Dorothy Sayers’s in 1949, John Ciardi’s in 1955, Mark Musa’s in 1971, C.H. Sisson’s in 1980, not to mention an Inferno by assorted poets broadcast by the BBC’s Third Programme in 1961, the prose versions by John Sinclair and Charles ...”

“... in which the King’s Secretary issued a warrant authorising two messengers to enter the home of John Entick and search for seditious papers. There was neither common law nor statutory authority for this action, which Entick successfully challenged in the courts, recovering damages from the hapless messengers (said to be ‘as much responsible as their ...”

“... Abbey’ as a ‘post-revolutionary’ work. Roe argues the poem is haunted by the spirit of John Thelwall, the radical orator who was extremely popular in the 1790s and to whom Roe’s book is dedicated. In 1798 Thelwall was living a few miles away from Tintern Abbey, having retired from political engagement after the wave of arrests which followed the ...”

“... into battle, patronised painters and builders, governed the country, and made and modified its laws. By contrast, they spent little of their time, and fewer of their resources, on doing good works. From Edward II until William and Mary, they presented maundy money to a handful of deserving indigents once each year; and from the Normans until the early ...”

“... picture of the electromagnetic ether; how to distinguish between dynamical and merely probable laws of nature; and how to leave a space for free will. The first of these puzzles emerged in the 1850s, when Maxwell, fresh from his triumphs in the prestigious Cambridge mathematics course, set out to reinterpret Faraday’s experiments on batteries, wires and ...”

“... to the efficacy of the law against matricide: it assumes rather a lot both about people and about laws. It certainly does nothing to elevate Posner’s cost-benefit analysis of sexual choice above what it is: an algebraic metaphor for some debatable facts. Elsewhere in the volume Posner himself considers the use of metaphor in legal reasoning. The ...”

“... The laws of hospitality are older than the laws of the United States of America!’ Diane di Prima shouted at the FBI agents who came to her cold-water apartment in Manhattan in 1956, looking for a young dissident writer from Yugoslavia. It was her first encounter with ‘the Big Reality that had undone so much of Hollywood, of New York ...”

“... human subjecthood was freedom, whereas the objective historical process was governed by inexorable laws. Some Marxists had problems with the first bit of this, since it smacked of laissez-faire; but it was hard to reject freedom out of hand and still clamour for social change. Marx himself sometimes sounds as though he is a determinist, and sometimes not. The ...”

“... with longer histories of industrialisation. (Those of us for whom Sunday lunch with the in-laws is the stuff of horror fiction must assume for the moment that this is a good thing.) On the other hand, if you hanker after the kind of contentment that results from a slow-moving, patriarchal and religious way of life you will be largely disappointed. As ...”

“... contributed to a no-nonsense, suck-it-and-see anti-intellectualism. For socialist playwrights like John Arden and Edward Bond, the consequence, in one case, is external and in the other a form of internal exile. But the most noted instance of the prophet rejecting his own country is the director Peter Brook who, having forged a glittering career in the British ...”