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Stephen Sedley: The Supreme Court’s Judgment, 2 March 2017

... of the British state. Its second article reads: ‘That the pretended power of dispensing with laws or the execution of laws by regall authoritie as it hath been assumed and exercised of late is illegall.’ For Scotland, the Claim of Right replicated the prohibition: ‘All Proclamationes asserting ane absolute power to ...

Diary

John Lanchester: Online Goodies, 25 April 2002

... the very computer on which I’m typing these words, and could knock you up a copy of the Shorter John Cage, gratis, in a matter of minutes); but recorded CDs are still expensive. The expense is, from the point of view of the record companies, pure profit. So the cartel loves CDs – why wouldn’t they? The high price of CDs kept sales a lot lower than they ...

Sing Tantarara

Colin Kidd, 30 October 1997

Secret and Sanctioned: Covert Operations and the American Presidency 
by Stephen Knott.
Oxford, 258 pp., £19.50, November 1996, 0 19 510098 0
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The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800 
by Conor Cruise O’Brien.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 367 pp., £25, December 1996, 1 85619 637 2
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American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson 
by Joseph Ellis.
Knopf, 365 pp., $26, February 1997, 0 679 44490 4
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Slave Laws in Virginia 
by Philip Schwarz.
Georgia, 253 pp., $40, November 1996, 0 8203 1831 0
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... of public opinion. The Presidential election of 1800, in which Jefferson trounced the incumbent John Adams, witnessed an outpouring of newspaper and pamphlet comment directed against his religious indifferentism. Could he be so sure that an atheist would neither pick his pocket nor break his leg? Soon after his death, a fellow Virginian, ‘Black Horse ...

Censorship

John Bayley, 7 August 1986

No, I’m not afraid 
by Irina Ratushinskaya, translated by David McDuff.
Bloodaxe, 142 pp., £4.95, May 1986, 0 906427 95 9
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Shcharansky: Hero of Our Time 
by Martin Gilbert.
Macmillan, 467 pp., £14.95, April 1986, 0 333 39504 2
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The Russian Orthodox Church: A Contemporary History 
by Jane Ellis.
Croom Helm, 531 pp., £27.50, April 1986, 0 7099 1567 5
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... society which enables it to set aside the majority feeling in favour of hanging, anti-homosexual laws, rescinding state payments to hippies. If it comes to that, there would probably still be a majority in this country in favour of the Lord Chamberlain’s rules on the theatre. There are ways round this in a pluralistic society, but in a monolithic one the ...

Short Cuts

Frederick Wilmot-Smith: Plainly Unconstitutional, 21 October 2021

... reached a decision that President Andrew Jackson disliked, Jackson is said to have remarked: ‘John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.’) If the court’s decisions are not seen as legitimate, its power could fade.Stephen Breyer, a Supreme Court justice since 1994, is concerned that this power is under threat. In his new book, The ...

Did Darwin get it right?

John Maynard Smith, 18 June 1981

... Species, he wrote: It is generally acknowledged that all organic beings have been formed on two laws – Unity of Type, and the Conditions of Existence. By unity of type is meant that fundamental agreement in structure which we see in organic beings of the same class, and which is quite independent of their habits of life. On my theory, unity of type is ...

Short Cuts

Chase Madar: Human Rights Window Dressing, 2 July 2015

... United Nations to investigate atrocities committed during Israel’s 2008-9 assault on Gaza. Or John Prendergast, a former Human Rights Watch researcher and co-founder of Enough, an anti-genocide group affiliated with the Centre for American Progress, who has called for military intervention to oust Robert Mugabe. It’s not just Americans: Michael ...

Phantom Gold

John Pemble: Victorian Capitalism, 7 January 2016

Forging Capitalism: Rogues, Swindlers, Frauds and the Rise of Modern Finance 
by Ian Klaus.
Yale, 287 pp., £18.99, January 2015, 978 0 300 18194 4
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... Victorian decade began in 1856, when the Tipperary Bank collapsed and the chairman’s brother, John Sadleir, a serial swindler up to his neck in debt, made the headlines with that suicide by poison on Hampstead Heath (thereby achieving immortality as Merdle in Little Dorrit). A sequence of failures followed: the Royal British Bank, the Western Bank of ...

Hoist that dollymop’s sail

John Sutherland: New Victorian Novels, 31 October 2002

Fingersmith 
by Sarah Waters.
Virago, 549 pp., £12.99, February 2002, 1 86049 882 5
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The Crimson Petal and the White 
by Michel Faber.
Canongate, 838 pp., £17.99, October 2002, 1 84195 323 7
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... high Victorian era. He rather regretted the public cleansing brought about by the ‘inspection’ laws of the 1860s, the successive Contagious Disease Acts, the Labouchere amendment providing two years’ hard labour for homosexuality and the killjoy liquor licensing and gaming laws of 1918. Sadleir, who was born in ...

The NHS Dismantled

John Furse, 7 November 2019

... by the US health insurance provider Kaiser Permanente in 1953. President Nixon’s adviser John Ehrlichman explained to his boss the basic concept before the passage of the 1973 HMO Act: ‘The less care they give them the more money they make.’ In May 2016 Jeremy Hunt, then health minister, admitted at a Commons Health Committee hearing that Kaiser ...

War and Peace

A.J.P. Taylor, 2 October 1980

Humanity in Warfare: the Modern History of the International Law of Armed Conflicts 
by Geoffrey Best.
Weidenfeld, 400 pp., £15, September 1980, 0 297 77737 8
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Pacifism in Britain 1914-1945: the Defining of a Faith 
by Martin Caedel.
Oxford, 342 pp., £12.50, August 1980, 0 19 821882 6
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... at war with the Red Indians, and of course the Red Indians also did not observe them. In fact, the laws of war were until recently confined to Europe, though Best ends by chronicling the present-day attempts to extend them more widely. In more precise terms, the laws of war began when the European states contended over their ...

Not God

David Lindley, 30 January 1992

Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science 
by Michael White and John Gribbin.
Viking, 304 pp., £16.99, January 1992, 0 670 84013 0
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... profession, requiring cogitation first and foremost. On the other hand, as Michael White and John Gribbin intimate, Hawking seems to have been a listless student and a rather charmless young man before ALS struck, obviously intelligent but lacking any passion to use his intelligence in one direction rather than another. Thus arises the idea that it was ...

From Notre Dame to Cluny, via a Beehive Hut

John Bossy: Abelard’s Final Fling, 2 July 1998

Abelard: A Medieval Life 
by M.T. Clanchy.
Blackwell, 416 pp., £45, January 1997, 0 631 20502 0
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... said in a rare witticism, there is nothing to prevent something which is in accordance with the laws of possibility and probability from having actually happened. Abelard, now master of the cathedral school, lodges in the cloister of Notre Dame, and takes as a pupil his landlord’s ward, who is known for her learning in classical letters, which is greater ...

I thirst! Water, I beseech thee

Mary Douglas: Sadducees v. Pharisees, 23 June 2005

How the Bible Became a Book: The Textualisation of Ancient Israel 
by William Schniedewind.
Cambridge, 257 pp., £25, May 2005, 0 521 82946 1
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... fairly. Sacred books don’t spring out of thin air; there was a Bible before ever its stories and laws were fixed in writing. How the Bible Became a Book starts with the history of writing and its impact on Judaism, but as it goes along, fascinating comparisons with other histories of ‘textualisation’ crop up, together with a wide range of similar ...

The Absolute Now

John Leslie, 12 May 1994

The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory 
by David Bohm, translated by Basil Hiley.
Routledge, 397 pp., £25, October 1993, 0 415 06588 7
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Black Holes and Baby Universes, and Other Essays 
by Stephen Hawking.
Bantam, 182 pp., £16.99, October 1993, 0 593 03400 7
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... communicated influences? Bohm and Hiley point to recent experiments inspired by the late John Bell. Particles generated in pairs can move apart while maintaining a mysterious connectedness. Observing the state of one, an experimenter can be sure that its distant partner is in a correlated state, in much the same way as examining one half of a fish ...

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