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“... feeling that there must be more to political life than perpetual defeat. Neil Kinnock and John Smith felt this as strongly as their successors, but their successors went a lot further. In a famous essay published nearly ninety years ago, Max Weber suggested that politics was becoming the territory of the professional: politics was the politician’s ...”

“... which Clavics eccentrically cranks, allowing Lawes’s name to prompt meditations on the death of laws (lower-case) and the atrophy of the will (‘Quasi-Shakespearean this play on Will’) in the present. ‘Clavics’ (Hill’s coinage) he defines as ‘the alchemy of keys’. It marks the latest phase in his poetic response to the 17th century. He has ...”

“... When an ailing John Maynard Keynes travelled to the American South in March 1946, he was delighted by what he found. The ‘balmy air and bright azalean colour’ of Savannah offered a welcome reprieve from the cold and damp of London, he wrote on arriving, and the children in the streets were livelier company than the ‘irritable’ and ‘exceedingly tired’ citizens of postwar Britain ...”

“... to Nobby’s and drink nickel draft beers. As a flaneur at the café he ‘read everyone, from John Fante to Aldous Huxley to Lao-tzu. My favourite novel at the time was Charles Bukowski’s Post Office, about a down-and-out barfly – a bleak omen, in retrospect, of where my life would one day land.’ (The epigraph of Beautiful Things is a few lines from ...”

“... the time of the Rivonia trial by the South African minister of justice and later prime minster John Vorster, who remarked that he would swap all his emergency laws for the clause of the Special Powers Act which allowed the British authorities to arrest and detain without trial, ban meetings, take land and destroy ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the same token, how accurately Stannard captures the flavour of Waugh’s relationship with his in-laws, the Herberts. Here again, if Waugh was the cringing snob of popular legend, you would have expected him to suck up to the Herberts. The opposite would have seemed to be the case. He abused them all roundly, particularly his brother-in-law Auberon. His ...”

“... makes a science? There is a science of fish because fish are similarly constituted, obey similar laws, have a discoverable essence, over and above the evident facts which lead us so to label them. (Fish constitute a ‘natural kind’.) Buttons, by contrast, have no such essence, and no common identity besides the function which we already know. There can be ...”

“... of Mount Desert Island and about its history, from Champlain who named it in the 17th century to John D. Rockefeller, but he still can’t accept it as a real place. When she talks of her friends, he asks: ‘Do they come even to a place as out-of-the-way as this?’ As if exasperated, she replies: ‘Let’s not rehash the myth of my solitude yet ...”

“... would betray confusion to deny that a legal system was valid because one thought that many of the laws in it were bad. On a parallel analysis of morality, two adherents of the same adequate moral system could disagree about its implications in a particular case, but this would be a real disagreement and it would not be possible for contradictory assertions to ...”

“... that it would ever ascend to such dizzy heights. In the course of the agitation against the Corn Laws in the early 1840s, the movement’s leaders, Richard Cobden and John Bright, gave encouragement to a proposal by a young Scotsman, James Wilson, to set up a weekly newspaper that would argue for the cause of free ...”

“... false position which hides fear behind a protective screen of supposedly objective facts, laws or norms. The first step in combatting it is to announce clearly: ‘What, then, is to be done? We must aussprechen was ist, “state the facts”, admit the truth that there is a tendency, or an opinion, in our Central Committee . . .’ What happened when ...”

“... of entire social groups that happen to get in the way. And then there is what Michael Walzer and John Rawls both call a ‘supreme emergency’, when direct attacks on civilian targets are required in circumstances of dire military necessity. Since, in the nuclear age, ‘supreme emergency has become a permanent condition,’ this means that it is legitimate ...”

“... is responsible for the budget and internal affairs, but only the King can legislate, publish laws, treaties and concessions. A decree of 1961 forbids the formation of political parties, and prohibits the profession of any ideology other than ‘Islam’. Anyone engaging in ‘violent action against the state or the royal family’ is liable to ...”

“... sciences, in the 18th century, were always said to be in a parlous state. Newton had laid down the laws: the Enlightenment was about playing his tunes. Apart from this prolonged act of deference, a deference then broken by the ‘Romantic’ reaction, nothing much was going on, in geology, or natural history, or medicine, or any-where else. All these, it was ...”