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“... were rubbed raw by the coarseness of American life, but, unlike Mrs Trollope, Captain Basil Hall and Charles Dickens, he could draw on the mutual regard that the War of Independence had created between the Americans and their French allies, and see the democratic virtues that lay beneath the rough exterior. More than than, he approached America with an ...”

“... by the warmth of Rousseau’s gratitude, and Rousseau was briefly exquisitely happy with Wootton Hall in Staffordshire, rented to him by Richard Davenport for a pittance. Then he took it into his head that Hume was mocking him behind his back; he also decided that Hume had been subsidising his stay in England, and of all the things calculated to render ...”

“... of the previous generation, he or she might well have mentioned, alongside Darwin and John Stuart Mill, the name of Sir Henry Maine, the subject of Karuna Mantena’s valuable new study. His name isn’t heard much anymore, but in his own day Maine (1822-88) was regarded as a towering public intellectual. He became regius professor of civil law at ...”

“... whether a strict Utilitarian schema could comprehend political as well as economic phenomena. John Stuart Mill’s exercises in retrieval in the next generation met with patchy success. He established a secure methodological foundation for political economy by restricting its scientific claims to hypothetical statements of the necessary relations between a ...”

“... tycoon Arron Banks and blessed by Nigel Farage and Ukip. Vote Leave is led by Michael Gove, Gisela Stuart and Boris Johnson, with the support of other longstanding Eurosceptic ministers and former ministers, such as Iain Duncan Smith, Nigel Lawson and David Owen. Then there’s Grassroots Out, which was supposed to bring the other two lots together. But the ...”

“... travels along paths ‘strewd with Rubies thicke as gravell’ to arrive at ‘Heavens bribeles hall/ Where noe corrupted voyces braule’. Ralegh’s ‘Nymph’s Reply’ to Marlowe’s ‘Passionate Shepherd to His Love’ combines imaginative description of delicate beauties with destruction and loss: Thie belt of strawe, and bedds of roses, Thie ...”

“... being unable to recite her lines. She joined Faith, and both were ‘sick and spewing in the lower hall’. Peace entered and ‘most rudely made war with her olive branch, and laid on the pates of those who did oppose her coming’. The same collection also contains a chilling account of what it was like to be told off by Elizabeth I. Harington records the ...”

“... to accuse the English of betraying their precious inheritance. The rot began, he said, with John Stuart Mill, who started off as a liberal but went on to swallow a toxic draught of German metaphysics and then succumbed to the feminist wiles of Harriet Taylor, who married him and led him astray. Under Taylor’s tutelage, it seems, Mill ‘slid slowly into ...”

“... profoundly out of step with the European Community Britain had joined in 1973. The economist Stuart Holland, the brains behind the AES, quickly came to feel that it had become too statist and dirigiste, not focused enough on competition and entrepreneurship.Benn’s influence inside Labour peaked with the deputy leadership election in 1981, which he lost ...”

“... what he tolerated in real life to constitute a sustained innovation. The distinguished Maoologist Stuart Schram discusses this in his essay in the final volume of the Cambridge History of China, while still taking Mao’s ideological legacy very seriously. The irony is that no one in China, neither the party leaders nor the masses, would regard the discussion ...”

“... Hugh had stuffed them with insurance policies. Some days the women went down to the Burgh Court Hall with their babes in arms. The municipal buildings. Everything smelled of wood waxing. A nervous succession of tenants would rise before the Baillie. ‘Why do you not pay your rent?’ ‘My man’s at the Front. No money. The wean’s sick. A don’t have ...”

“... and Superman were bought in 1949. These were followed by Dante, The Greeks by Kitto, Spinoza by Stuart Hampshire, Barabbas by Pär Lagerkvist, all the way to Sophocles and Rousseau in 1953. A very European selection. Also on the shelf is Three to Get Married, by Bishop Sheen. I thought this was about a ménage à trois, but the third turned out to be ...”

“... in America had the desired effect. Positive reviews appeared in the French press, and, from John Stuart Mill, in the London Review. The doors to Parisian salons were now open, but Tocqueville soon found himself exhausted by the engagements of literary society, which he considered a distraction from his political and philosophical ambitions. A first attempt ...”

“... books as prizes in a writing competition. The premises are in Hanover Square up behind the Town Hall and beyond the Infirmary, and, when I was a boy, one of the grander squares in Leeds, where the posh doctors and surgeons from the Brotherton Wing had their consulting-rooms. Nowadays the ring road makes the square difficult to get to and it’s in a bad ...”

“... and Engels wrote, ‘in Saint-Just’s illusion. On the day of his execution he saw hanging in the Hall of the Conciergerie the great tables of the Rights of Man, and with pride and self-esteem declared: “After all, it was I who did that.” But those tables proclaimed the rights of a man who could no more be the man of ancient society than his ...”