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“... The refutation of utilitarianism, and its replacement by some new and comprehensive alternative, has become one of the major Anglo-American growth industries. The problem of how to live with a liberal and mildly interventionist state if we no longer accept the premisses upon which such a state was originally founded has rightly exercised philosophers on both sides of the Atlantic, though it is striking how difficult it has proved for them fully to disentangle themselves from the old ways of thinking ...”

“... Scientists’ in our culture are (in many disciplines) people who perform ‘experiments’ in ‘laboratories’ and ‘testify’ about them to a wider community of like-minded people who then try to draw conclusions from the ‘facts’ put before them. The subject of this entertaining and important study is in effect the emergence of this practice and the removal of quotation-marks from these hitherto contentious or puzzling terms ...”

“... sovereignty is absolute, perpetual and indivisible; to divide or share it is to destroy it. Richard Tuck’s new book, based on the Seeley Lectures he delivered at Cambridge in 2012, was conceived long before the EU referendum was tabled. But although he doesn’t engage with the present debate, he does identify the correct method of trying to ...”

“... to have felt that voting might be a special case that needed further consideration. However, as Richard Tuck points out in his fascinating new book about the strange hold that the free rider problem has had on political science ever since Olson, such misgivings have not stopped many of his followers from treating voting as the paradigmatic case of the ...”

“... and genuinely original. The most striking and in some ways the most ambitious of the three is Richard Tuck’s. But it is also the shortest and, because of a certain shift of focus and an almost wilfully enigmatic ending, in some ways the least satisfying. Tuck begins from the wish to resolve a number of problems ...”

“... drew on arguments the kings themselves had to make in order to raise taxes and fund their wars. As Richard Tuck has suggested, it may have been Charles himself who opened the door to democracy in England. Levying an ancient tax on coastal towns (ship money) to fund a naval expedition against the Dutch, the Crown made the claim that the people’s safety ...”

“... context. It is, nevertheless, from a work which is in some ways close in spirit to Skinner, Richard Tuck’s Natural Rights Theories, that the most penetrating recent criticism of Warrender has come. Of the trio of Hobbes scholars I mentioned above, Oakeshott is the one whose ideas stand most in need of further development today, for he is one of ...”

“... which only a jus gentium could alleviate. In the next two chapters – ‘Grotius and Selden’ (Richard Tuck) and ‘Hobbes and Spinoza’ (Noel Malcolm) – we see these demands being met by theorists operating for the most part in Netherlands and English political contexts which are depicted in sufficient detail to let us understand the movement out ...”

“... of its authors, who understand that provincial sentiment cannot explain everything. One of them, Richard Tuck, explores a subject which it could not explain, the hitherto perplexing decision of the great lawyer John Selden to support Parliament in the Civil War. A historian of political science, Tuck does not ...”

“... readers? A few scholars have solved this difficulty by adopting a narrow geographical format. Richard White’s The Middle Ground (1991), for example, is a brilliant history of how the French, British and American empires interacted both with each other and with native Indians over two centuries in the Great Lakes region of North America. But what if one ...”

“... the political spectrum: Noel Malcolm of All Souls, editor of Leviathan for Oxford, on the right; Richard Tuck of Harvard, author of the finest contextualisation of Hobbes’s thought, on the left. Differing in outlook in so many ways, their convergence on Brexit is all the more arresting. For Malcolm, who intervened in 1991 before the Treaty of ...”

“... fun it is to be read to,’ Prince Charles said at the end. ‘It’s like bedtime.’ ‘I can tuck you in too, if you like,’ Gillian Anderson said. ‘Yes, please,’ he said. At which point, the smile disappeared from the duchess’s face and they went downstairs to a waiting Land Rover. Gillian and I were ushered into a car behind them and lights ...”

“... Who now, other than historians of modern France, remembers Richard Cobb? Cobb’s Wikipedia entry – the canonical index of posterity’s interest – measures three lines; by contrast, Hugh Trevor-Roper, his principal addressee in this collection, gets five thousand words. Yet Cobb, who died in 1996, was not only a historian of acknowledged genius ...”

“... and Richmond Park.On the Continent, meanwhile, things were changing fast. In Baroque Bohemia, as Tuck-well lucidly relates, the horn took a ‘great leap forward’ from the chase to the chamber group. In the early 1680s, a certain Franz Anton, Count von Sporck found himself so pleased by the cors de chasse at Louis XIV’s court that he took some horns home ...”

“... Many people firmly believe there was. We owe the widespread belief that Robin lived in the time of Richard I (1157-1199) to William Stukeley (1687-1765), an eccentric scholar of ancient British history who fabricated for him a crazy family pedigree going back to the Normans. Knight argues that the search for the historical Robin is as quixotic as the search ...”