“... of The Mystic Masseur. The urge to decorate at least doesn’t die. Many of the Penguin covers David Gentleman did, including those for the New Penguin Shakespeare, are wood engravings. The sharp, definite lines, a characteristic of the medium, suits their small scale. The style of some more recent Penguin series – the Gothic Horrors covers by Coralie ...”

“... privacy is even now being fiercely defended by Stephen Spender against the intrusive Hugh David. There has recently been the quarrel between Nabokov’s biographers – the publishing rascal Andrew Field and friend of the family, Brian Boyd. Should Diane Middlebrook have had access to Anne Sexton’s psychiatric records? Did Lawrence Durrell commit ...”

“... with a young family, died of a brain tumour in 1937. Manning’s husband from 1939, R.D. (Reggie) Smith, a British Council teacher and later an academic and BBC radio producer, drank a lot and was a compulsive, if helpfully complaisant, philanderer. Among other men she was attracted to, the novelist William Gerhardie proved to have sadistic tendencies which ...”

“... prize, the alleged kingpin of Tulia’s drug trade. Another of those arrested was Donnie Smith. Charismatic, a former star athlete, he had graduated from high school against the odds. But he was soon getting into fights and taking drugs. A failed marriage and a series of dead-end jobs didn’t help. He was known to be on crack, and to have sold small ...”

“... of the revolution to promote intellectual and religious freedom within the republic, Joseph Smith and William Miller saw liberation as the fruit not of revolution but of exodus. Smith envisioned a new kingdom of the saints and led his followers to the West; the Millerites awaited the end of the world, and prepared ...”

“... at the best of times – failed to perceive their good fortune; they still don’t.Although David Trimble, the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, had played a central role in negotiating the agreement, many unionists believed they had been conned. While the agreement won the near unanimous endorsement of nationalists in Northern Ireland, it was ...”

“... There wasn’t anything inevitable about David Cameron’s rise. If Kenneth Clarke had stirred himself into running something like a campaign when competing for the leadership with Iain Duncan Smith and been ready to appear more tractable on Europe; if David Davis had moved decisively in the immediate aftermath of Michael Howard’s resignation or been a more fluent speaker; if Howard had offered Cameron the shadow chancellorship or George Osborne had not accepted it – if these or any number of other contingencies had been otherwise, Cameron might not have become leader ...”

“... The book gathered a buzz, went to America, won a prize from the Believer, then in 2008 Zadie Smith wrote about it in the New York Review of Books, in tandem with Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. Smith immediately got the point of the McCarthy project, its vehemence, its attack on the plushy poshlust of what she called ...”

“... Slessor’s good works on the Upper Niger still earn her an image on Scottish banknotes, while David Livingstone became the world’s best-known Scotsman. They did not save many souls. After 50 years’ work in India, the missions could show only 3359 converts. But their influence on empire was deep and paradoxical, at once the advance guard of colonialism ...”

“... professor to the University of Edinburgh who was thrilled to learn that his office would be in David Hume Tower. Picturing a fortified keep adorned with stepped gables and corbelled turrets, he was sorely disappointed on arrival to discover that the tower was a fourteen-storey Brutalist slab.The tower has always been controversial. Conservation groups ...”

“... galleries, alongside woodwork from the period. The curator who acquires it, Harold Clifford Smith, is an upper-middle-class Englishman straight out of central casting: the son of a wine merchant, educated at public school and Oxford, devoted to his old college, a regular contributor to Country Life. During the Great War, he serves in the intelligence ...”

“... as prime minister. Some of this, of course, also relates to his struggles with Blair. When John Smith died in 1994, and Brown reluctantly decided to step aside to allow Blair to take the crown, it was partly because ‘the Murdoch press were all backing Tony … writing [him] up as the only moderniser. It was wholly unfair but predictable.’ Brown feared ...”

“... to think – they bring about a new kind of social order: a ‘division of labour’, as Adam Smith called it, which fosters individual innovation and specialisation, and directs scarce resources where society needs them most. The problems affecting a mature capitalist system are obvious (trade cycles, unemployment, inflation and constant upheaval), but ...”

“... the invention of the breechloading metal cartridge, which made rifled weapons easy to load. Soon Smith and Wesson revolvers and Enfield rifles made rapid, accurate fire possible for the first time. If the argument against gun ownership is that guns are too dangerous to be entrusted to individuals who may be mad or bad, then 1850 would seem to be the date at ...”

“... her husband wrote a treatise, Oeconomiques (1745), that anticipated the calls of Turgot and Adam Smith for freer trade. The Dupins purchased some of their wine from the Baron de Montesquieu, though the two families fell out after Montesquieu published De l’esprit des lois in 1748 (Claude resented his attack on tax farming and Louise his tolerance for ...”