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“... is Mr Gradgrind to a T. He believes in education and the extension of knowledge. He wants to see laws formulated for every department of life that will push back the ever shrinking areas of ignorance, light up dark corners with modern illumination, keep the streets of the mind patrolled. In the interests of thoroughgoing enlightenment, he has forbidden the ...”

“... murder and atrocious cruelty were European monopolies. A look into Aztec or Mayan history, or into John Roscoe’s early 20th-century history of the Buganda kingdom, will correct any such error. What seems to have been a specially European capacity, from the early medieval period, was the resort to instant, frantic aggression as ‘shock and awe’ to break an ...”

“... War movement was the same man who had, half a century before, hounded Emma Goldman and John Reed and, later, put Leon Trotsky under surveillance in Mexico. This longevity makes Hoover’s biography a wonderful subject. Powers’s book is painfully neutral and somewhat pedestrian at times, but his authoritative command of his sources makes it ...”

“... life of the criminal was forfeited – ‘sacrificed’ was the 18th-century term – ‘to the laws of his country’, which enshrined the sanctity of property, or of a man’s home, or of paper money or of normative sexuality. These were worth someone dying for and a number of thieves, burglars, forgers, sodomites and rapists were hanged because, it was ...”

“... country – Churchill most obstinately of all. Guy Burgess was one of those – James Klugmann and John Cornford were the chief – who helped to induct me into the Party. We belonged to the same college, and hence to the same ‘cell’. I remember Burgess as a rather plump, fresh-faced youth, of guileless, almost cherubic expression. I heard him spoken of as ...”

“... Assembly; the Prussian Constituent Assembly or Nationalversammlung in Berlin, elected under new laws created for the purpose; the Frankfurt Parliament, convoked in the elegant circular chamber of St Paul’s Church in the city of Frankfurt. The Hungarian Diet was a very old body, but in 1848 a new national Diet was convened in the city of Pest. When the ...”

“... relatively simple one of whether no means no or yes, but what else even a genuine no might mean. John Forrester puts the matter very well in Dispatches from the Freud Wars (1997) when he asks how we tell the difference between ‘a patient’s independent judgment of psychoanalysis’ and ‘a negative transference’. ‘That is the fundamental problem in ...”

“... offering a service people really want. Otherwise they will be reduced to the didactic posture of John Reith or Matthew Arnold, pretending to know better than people themselves what is good for them. This idea, in the Thatcherite spring of the 1980s, lent pro-market advocacy its anti-elitist patina. The efficiency argument is just as familiar. Take a ...”

“... existence under such titles as ‘Is Life Worth Living?’ and ‘What Makes a Life Significant’.John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle’s book is an anthology of these writings, from a letter James wrote when at Harvard Medical School in the 1860s to ‘A Pluralistic Mystic’, an argument against rationalising away mystical experiences that was published in ...”

“... wave of appointees also included one who was, in the words of an admirer, Europe’s equivalent of John Marshall, the patriarch of the Supreme Court in the US, responsible for establishing its authority across the land. Robert Lecourt was a leading politician in the French version of the Christian Democratic parties of Italy and Germany, the Mouvement ...”

“... In 1993 John McGahern wrote an essay called ‘The Church and Its Spire’, in which he considered his own relationship to the Catholic Church. He made no mention of the fact that he had, in the mid-1960s, been fired from his job as a teacher on the instructions of the Catholic archbishop of Dublin because he had written a novel banned by the Irish Censorship Board (The Dark), and because he had been married in a register office ...”

“... 1568, stated plainly by Chief Justice Dyer on behalf of the Court of Common Pleas. The redoubtable John Lilburne, at his trial for high treason in 1649, said to the court: ‘By the laws of England I am not to answer questions against or concerning my selfe,’ and Justice Keble reassured him: ‘You shall not be ...”

“... turning on a pound of flesh.The pound of flesh brings us in sight of that ‘Tunne of Man’, Sir John Falstaff. I’ve been arguing that, throughout Shakespeare’s developing power of characterisation, the physical has a special place: from Crab the dog to Richard Crookback, then to Bottom, then to the magnificently delineated yet isolated Shylock, and ...”

“... besides. When the Bill making the registration of births compulsory was introduced in 1836, Lord John Russell, recommending it to Parliament, said that everyone would ‘so soon perceive the benefit of having their children’s names inserted in the general register that it would not be very long before every one would be willing to concur in carrying out ...”

“... redemption, and include the news that Effie Bawn was the nicest person to live in Glasgow since St John Ogilvie. But before that day, as a reformed woman, Netta would rinse her clothes in Barlinnie Prison, for other niceness, and other reform. She incited a crowd to riot, and was said to be behind the suffragette burning of Leuchars Station. Netta held young ...”