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“... my own. A computer game can be thought of as having both an argument and a story. If the argument held up, the game would work; if it didn’t, the computer would let you know, stopping the program to announce tersely that you’d made a ‘Mistake’ or a ‘Syntax error’, or that there was ‘No such variable at line 140’. I could, most of the time, get ...”

“... There wasn’t anything inevitable about David Cameron’s rise. If Kenneth Clarke had stirred himself into running something like a campaign when competing for the leadership with Iain Duncan Smith and been ready to appear more tractable on Europe; if David Davis had moved decisively in the immediate aftermath of Michael Howard’s resignation or been a more fluent speaker; if Howard had offered Cameron the shadow chancellorship or George Osborne had not accepted it – if these or any number of other contingencies had been otherwise, Cameron might not have become leader ...”

“... success of the economy.’ And whose success is that, if not the rival for his job whom Blair has held at bay for all these years? There has been nothing naive about the methods that Blair and his acolytes have employed for that purpose. But he is being very naive if he believes that it is not to his thwarted rival’s skill that credit for Labour’s ...”

“... dismantling of structures of political domination and social solidarity, feudal fetters which had held back the country’s capitalist progress and which, in locally different manifestations, continue to block capitalist rationalisation in many other European countries. First among the events that put West Germany on the path to what it would later become was ...”

“... defined their mentality as ‘the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy’. They held themselves and other puritans to severe account, an obsession they grew into a social vision. They were hard on sin and hard on the causes of sin; they urged magistrates and ministers to join forces, to wield the sword in the service of scripture. But, as ...”

“... recorded by the French-Mauritian chronicler Nicolas Mayeur in 1806 and reproduced in the late David Graeber’s Pirate Enlightenment, called for gun flints, lead balls, gunpowder and river water to be mixed in an upturned shield with the point of a knife, the draught then taken with ginger soaked in the blood of the oath-takers. Mayeur, a retired slave ...”

“... public, and threatened to undermine the respect in which figures of authority were supposed to be held. Outside Parliament they caused a sensation, for though Hone published only 3000 of each (and withdrew them from sale partly because they had offended his father), the notoriety given them in speeches by the attorney-general and Lord Sidmouth, the home ...”

“... trafficking in what should not be sold, especially when it doesn’t sell? A thought triggered by David Willetts’s amiable description of the publications a distinguished scholar might bring to the RAE as ‘a good back catalogue’. Austin and Wittgenstein had plenty of thoughts, and a huge influence on philosophy, but at the time of their death almost no ...”

“... poet’s life find the MS first, but it isn’t the most important fact about her. Perillo, who held a degree in wildlife management, worked in the 1980s for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, assisting in veterinary laboratories, tracking predators in Colorado, and patrolling nature reserves in California, where (she wrote) ‘bird-watching was what I did ...”

“... and prefigured in the stories of the Old Testament, hidden again in his incarnation, and held to be present in the Eucharist. He is the object of a form of worship in which rational thinking supports an intense spirituality.Some of these pictures – above all those of Philippe de Champaigne – seem to be direct illustrations of Pascal’s paradox ...”

“... from Lytle and Orgel, F.W. Kent and Patricia Simons have turned the proceedings of a conference held in Melbourne in 1983 into a valuable volume of essays on patronage in Renaissance Italy. What is particularly interesting about both collections is the fact that they discuss two kinds of patronage and, at least on occasion, the relations between them. The ...”

“... the victim of Mammon and the casualty of market forces. In the days when the Church still held an entrenched place in the fabric of British society, the responsibility for publishing its own biennial Who’s Who was one that rested proudly with the nation’s premier academic publishing-house, the Oxford University Press. Gradually, however, this ...”

“... away from the eyes of the international community. The ‘autonomy’ envisaged by the Camp David agreements is unlikely to extend beyond garbage collection. Ostensibly Two Minutes over Baghdad is a True Life Adventure Story in the ‘Entebbe’ tradition, in which an author trades his skills as a publicist against ‘inside’ information supplied by ...”

“... invention filled the political vacuum, at least in England. A regency was rejected; James was held to have abdicated; and the infant James, who should have succeeded his father, was passed over for the crown, on the specious pretence that the baby was a pretender, smuggled into the queen’s apartments in a warming pan. The crown passed instead to William ...”

“... and the so-called Jews of today. If Zionism preaches a glorious history going back to the days of David and Solomon, then that history must be a fiction cooked up centuries later for ideological purposes. If Zionism maintains that Jews longed to go home, then they must have been content to stay put. And if Zionists base their claim to the land of Israel on ...”