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“... There are, finally, three complementary essays on the political thought of David Hume. Nicholas Phillipson writes on Hume’s discussions of the legitimacy of the post-Revolutionary regime, while Istvan Hont and John Robertson show Hume dwelling, in apprehensive mood, on the themes of commerce and war. Hont demonstrates Hume’s alarm, in the ...”

“... sentiments into Thatcherspeak, though it can be done. A further incongruity comes into focus in Nicholas Phillipson’s splendid biography: that the 18th-century moral philosopher bore no resemblance in character or demeanour to those who most loudly promote his purported legacy. It’s hard to imagine today’s muscular big business conservatives ...”

“... the questionable assumption that Parliament was a perfect microcosm of the nation. A reading of Nicholas Phillipson’s skilful and lucid study of David Hume serves to enlarge our sense of these limitations. Needless to say, there is no mention of Hume in Namier’s indexes, though he would have found congenial his 18th-century counterpart’s ...”

“... in Europe’. Sentimental nationalism – an earlier manifestation of which Nicholas Phillipson described as ‘an ideology of noisy inaction’ – has served for two centuries as a tolerable substitute for the real thing, much to the disgust of a minority of constitutional nationalists. One of them, Jim Sillars, the former SNP MP ...”