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“... It is a nice question whether Britain’s economic institutions or the attempts of economists to explain why they do not tick are in a greater mess. Every now and then, albeit with decreasing regularity, a government minister will tell us, as the Chief Secretary of the Treasury does in the collection of essays on The 1982 Budget, that there is a new dawn over the hill, that, before our very eyes, ‘things are improving’ – only to be contradicted by some even more authoritative voice, although it hardly needs the CBI to remind us of the frailty of political positive thinking ...”

“... In April 1935, with the staple industries stagnating and over two million people out of work, Harold Macmillan rose in the Commons to press for a radical policy of industrial reconstruction and public investment. What, he asked, were the arguments against public capital expenditure? ‘What is the case of the Treasury, the people who really govern England from the Box that is outside?’ His answer was that the Treasury was immobilised by fear of ‘artificial’ expansion, a consequent collapse and an increased burden of debt ...”

“... Martin Wiener and others: entrepreneurs, the argument goes, will be entrepreneurs. Thus Professor Supple sums up the record of the British coal owners in the inter-war years as follows: ‘The historical debate about entrepreneurship in the coal industry has possibly been too much influenced by an understandable dislike of the coal owner’s political and ...”

“... In essence, Fraser’s picture illuminates the aggregates, tables and arguments assembled by Barry Supple in his essay on the same subject in the second volume of Floud and McCloskey. Here is the rise of a mass market, a revolution in retailing, and the transformation of light industry, with results which have lingered until our own day. For the ...”

“... might be extended to keep pace. While Armitage and Crawford include more poets, O’Brien is more supple and reflective of the diverse poetries of the last twenty or so years. His brief introductions to each poet are also bibliographically useful, critically independent and sometimes funny (he describes C.H. Sisson as ‘an acquired taste’ who seems ...”

“... takes place that will not finally be redeemed and retrieved. As the self-educated inventor Fred T. Barry assures our eponymous hero: ‘Human being [sic] always treat blizzards as though they were the end of the world.’ But the raging storms that have swept over the plains of the Middle West are due to vanish without trace, or without significant ...”

“... the lights up. And there he would be, dressed like a tramp, his eyes filled with light, his face supple, his expression charming if it were not so sad and rueful. Ready to do his Beckett one-man show. Moving just a tiny bit, not his body and not really his eyes, but his face doing a sudden flicker as the breath came. He was almost going to speak and then ...”