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“... government. The Republic puts the ideal city under the rule of the philosopher-king, and even the Laws. Plato’s final defence of the ‘second-best’, practicable city, envisages an ideological watchdog in the shape of the Nocturnal Council, staffed by a priesthood with powers of life and death over dissenters of all sorts. Stone is prone to hit Socrates ...”

“... Victorian Minds, presented a throng of thinkers, in a celebration of cerebration. And her study of John Stuart Mill suggested that different states of mind might dwell within the same body. The result of this approach is a rich and unusual brand of intellectual history: more interested in the typical and representative second-rate figure than the transcendent ...”

“... himself lamented that most Greeks of his day were in one way or other fundamentally irreligious (Laws, 948C). Hence the enlightened vision of ancient Greece, in which the Greeks are seen as a singular race, undisturbed by religious terrors, uncorrupted by superstitious folly, their lives governed by human reason – or misgoverned by human passion. The gods ...”

“... an array) which responds to the commands of its operators (players, citizens) according to the laws of physics, economics or morality or according to alternative rules if the programmer prefers. The simplest example is the flight simulator, a device that began life as the Link trainer, an enclosed cockpit with stubby wings that dipped and pitched and ...”

“... that the 1933 purge of Jews in public employment was ‘wildly popular’, that the Nuremberg Laws were ‘very popular’ and that Germans’ reaction to Kristallnacht showed their ‘enthusiasm for the eliminationist enterprise’. Unsubtantiated assertions like these are repeated throughout the book. They are essential to the argument because he ...”

“... philosophy. As a youth, Melbourne spent two winters in Glasgow, living plainly and studying with John Millar, disciple of David Hume and Adam Smith, and one of the most influential proselytisers for the Scottish Enlightenment. This experience gave him a strong commitment to the principles of political economy; it also profoundly influenced his thinking on ...”

“... formed relationships with influential figures in the Liberal Party, including the ageing John Bright and the anticolonial poet Wilfrid Blunt. He forged links with women’s rights activists and working-class representatives, sharing a platform with William Morris. He supported improving the lives of labouring Britons, while educating his audiences ...”

“... how to compose a Dadaist poem: cut out bits of newspaper, put them in a bag, shake it, allow the laws of chance to rearrange the words into a poem. But Isou wanted to take it further, breaking down the words themselves to produce such phoneme-masticating lines as ‘vagn bagadou kri kuss balala chimorabissss …’ If Dada, to use Isou’s ...”

“... and butterflies to realise Titania’s fairy attendants accurately and Victorian artists such as John Anster Fitzgerald also borrowed features from the insect world to make their fairylands convincing. Today, through the ingenuities of CGI, many of these hybrids now speak and weep, appearing convincingly embodied and entirely sentient. Entertainments, from ...”

“... intention, republished it, and were indicted, with what Keith Smith, in the Oxford History of the Laws of England, calls ‘evangelical indignation and hyperbolic fervour’, for ‘wickedly devising … to vitiate and corrupt … and to incite and encourage … indecent, obscene, unnatural and immoral practices, and bring them to a state of ...”

“... socialist and family planner, promoted vaginal diaphragms in heroic defiance of the Comstock laws, but also urged the sterilisation of racial inferiors. Is the conjunction of race and liberal freedoms any less surreal today, when, in the common African-American jest-cum-genuine-complaint, the police are seen to clamp down vigorously on the offence of ...”

“... to bolster the movie’s plot – the future Tammany Hall boss William M. Tweed, Archbishop John Hughes and the showman P.T. Barnum – are either transported backwards in time or engage in alliances with gangs that defy the actual marginality of these gangs within the class and power structure of the mid-century city. As for Gangs of New York’s ...”

“... Germany and at first didn’t hesitate to express his impatience with the scare: when asked by Sir John Barlow, MP for Frome, whether he was aware that there were 66,000 German soldiers in England and 50,000 stands of Mauser rifles stored in cellars within a few hundred yards of Charing Cross, he thanked Barlow for providing such an excellent example of the ...”

“... but that cut little ice with Britain’s puritans, and the idea of forcing it on people who had laws against its use was deplored. You could blame the Chinese, as many Chinese themselves did. ‘If your people are virtuous,’ Henry Pottinger, the most unbending of Britain’s agents in China, claimed, ‘they will desist from the evil practice; and if your ...”

“... Park are the obvious example – and to historians who suspected that Britain’s secrecy laws might be hiding something important. This used to be a sensitive area. A few years ago, if you voiced this suspicion you would be called a conspiracy theorist, which was hardly helpful if you were an academic historian. But as some of these suspicions came ...”