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“... monarch who was both male and monogamous was probably King George III. Put the other way, this means that from Nell Gwyn to Mrs Keppel (and beyond), the courtesan was an integral part of royal history. But while much is known about such women as the Duchess of Portsmouth, Elizabeth Villiers, Henrietta Howard and the Countess of Warwick, no serious attempt ...”

“... disagreed with Rousseau about the theatre being a school for vice; instead he saw it as a means of educating society in civic and moral values. Earnest sentiments make stodgy literature, however, and Eugénie and Les Deux Amis have a stagy, sentimental humanitarianism which has dated badly. For a new venture, he returned to the spirit of the ...”

“... heroism under de Gaulle’s leadership underpinned his project of postwar reconstruction; it was a means of bridging the rift between those – far more numerous than de Gaulle was prepared to admit – who had supported Pétain or the occupying forces, and those who had not; and it enabled virtually everyone to identify with victory. De Gaulle was convinced ...”

“... least by modern standards. Communications were slow and unreliable, and only the most rudimentary means existed for tracking individual malefactors. Especially in remote towns, a determined band might carry out a brazen robbery, and it would be days before the constabulary responded, by which point the perpetrators had long since disappeared. If any of them ...”

“... a happy time in Montana in 1985 watching ‘marmosets scramble around above the snow line’ (he means marmots). And on page 808 (we’re up to 1998), he identifies the secretary of state for Northern Ireland as Mo Mowlan (for Mowlam). In other words, I have read My Life, all of it, closely enough to catch two slips of somebody’s pen, probably Clinton’s ...”

“... to the way things are, they simply want to be free to drift along with their fate. All this makes David Cameron a classic democratic fatalist, rather than the pragmatist he likes to present himself as. He certainly behaved like one when he exercised his veto in Brussels. The definition of a pragmatic conservative is someone who wants things to change so that ...”

“... survived, although to this day it remains hard to know how they managed it, without any obvious means of support. Like all smaller clubs they had to sell on many of their best players (including the outstanding Nigel Winterburn to Arsenal), but eccentricity or notoriety meant that others remained with the side long after they became the focus of ...”

“... own translation and commentary on the most literary of all the Bible’s narratives, the story of David. The translation is conservative, fully in line with the Authorised Version (and all the better for that). The commentary is up to date, absorbing not only the latest scholarship but concentrating on the extraordinary narrative power of the story of family ...”

“... make sense of the senseless. By recording the reality of the shooting, Reynolds affords herself a means of emotional survival. She also provides the rest of us with the human response missing from the police in all these videos: disbelief, rage, grief, the recognition that yet another young black man has been killed. The video transforms an excruciating ...”

“... everyone better off. It is not simply the case that in England and Wales economic inequality means bad outcomes are shunted down the social scale; it is also true that inequality means bad outcomes are being distributed across the social scale, making even rich English parents more vulnerable than poor Swedish ...”

“... Only on this condition can we pretend to think what must separate us from this position.’ He means that our choices, too, are arbitrary, but finds a way of saying so which implies that we, too, are guilty. De Graef takes this line because he is trapped by the assumption of the later de Man that the very idea of a moral choice is unintelligible. Many ...”

“... his understanding of the world in which he finds himself is also conventionally princely, which means that it is blinkered, limited and naive. He does not like politicians, whom he regards as too much concerned with short-term objectives, and more interested in partisan success than the good of the country. Nor does he approve of experts and ...”

“... is intensely vulnerable to natural disruption. Bringing people together in ever larger numbers means that if something goes wrong, everyone suffers. Emanuel takes for granted that if we keep up the population pressure, human ingenuity will always stay one step ahead of natural risk. Ever since Malthus warned that population growth was bound to outpace food ...”

“... is to decide which non-spurious generalisations are useful in making the general rules. By no means all of them are useful. For example, it is almost certainly true that there are non-spurious generalisations to be made about the likelihood of certain types of passengers posing a threat to airline security, on the basis of age, gender and ethnic ...”

“... to attract attention in 1993. The editors think the pace of change at the end of the 20th century means that traditional works of reference are going to have a hard time keeping up. Really they have no idea. 1993 wasn’t so long ago; Bill Clinton was president, a fact that the Columbia editors boast about having been able to include at the last moment (the ...”