“... and find that we were ‘out of time’. But now? Well, ‘it’s here and I like it,’ as Will Smith says in his greeting card to the new year ‘Will 2K’. There isn’t much anxiety in this song, it’s time to celebrate. What exactly? The ‘Willennium’, he helpfully suggests, ‘the party of a lifetime ... resolution: get the money’. Future ...”

“... chronicle of three generations is the distillation of a much fuller chronicle kept by Harry Smith, the last boss, who quit in 1917. The trouble with Harry is that he is more interested in boilermaking than in social observation. On the run from the Bolsheviks and sharing a freezing hotel room, he notes with delight that the water in his bedside carafe ...”

“... need look no further than Web of Corruption, which tells the story of John Poulson and T. Dan Smith. Raymond Fitzwalter and David Taylor took eight years to research and write their analysis of the most far-reaching corruption trial of this century. The opening summary is startling. Of those prosecuted in connection ...”

“... to literary examples, Manning traces the provincialising of Calvinist attitudes in the writings of David Hume, Jonathan Edwards, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others. Far from a mechanical application of rigid doctrinal categories, Manning’s thoughtful critique shows how contradictory ...”

“... he chooses to reveal now about himself and his co-founders Matthew Symonds and Andreas Whittam-Smith he might have found recruits hard to come by. Comparing his book with my own memory of events is an odd experience: the office furniture is the same, even the faces are, so why does everything look different? Of the trio who set up the Sunday paper, Ian ...”

“... theorist of economic recovery seems to be the early 19th-century French populariser of Adam Smith known to Marx as ‘the inane Jean-Baptiste Say … [who] refutes himself again’. The most successful recent guide to the economy – a work called Wealth and Poverty, described by the Republican Director of the Office of Management and Budget as ...”

“... alumni of the Slade: Paul and John Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson, Edward Wadsworth, William Roberts and David Bomberg. They were all influenced, directly or indirectly, by Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibition of 1910, which introduced the British to Continental art, especially Cézanne, but they were able to develop their own work with an originality that weaker ...”

“... preoccupations and tastes. In her straining after the essence of things, she reminds one of David Malouf and of Bruce Chatwin (who married into her clan). I don’t mean that she copies them: she is too committed, too intense for that; an element of what an American reviewer called ‘self-administered therapy’ convinces one that she is too seriously ...”

“... either his own or somebody else’s. There is, indeed, much truth in this notion, for, as Adam Smith had implied, the market, together with its twin, private property, was the great invoker of city-building energies and the great though blind mediator of their outcome. But then in the last years of Victoria’s reign the great faults of the cities began to ...”

“... of what they were doing. Blair inherited Labour’s commitment to devolution from John Smith, and though he had little principled attachment to it, he clearly saw its political advantages. In particular, he saw devolution as a way of cementing a centre-left alliance of Labour and the Liberal Democrats (and at a stretch the nationalists as well) in ...”

“... has advocated ‘home rule all round’ in a new federal union. A similar call has come from David Melding, the Conservative deputy presiding officer of the Welsh Assembly, in The Reformed Union: The UK as a Federation, published last year; while Conservatives at Westminster, including Kenneth Baker, Malcolm Rifkind and members of the so-called Democracy ...”

“... way she’d chosen to live. In 1992, Lucca herself had been instructed by X to discourage Theodore Smith, an interested biographer. ‘Her life will not become a historical object,’ Lucca says during a meeting with him in a café. ‘Only her work will remain.’ But when X dies unexpectedly four years later, Smith sells ...”

“... waiters, until it becomes their proper nature. It is the same with writers and artists. Byron or David or Robert Lowell cannot slink off and become their ordinary selves in the intervals of being poets and painters and men of the age. Greta Garbo is always Greta Garbo, once she has found the part. But there is quite a different category of actor, as of ...”

“... from outside Parliament, continuing the practice of his predecessor, Rishi Sunak, who appointed David Cameron as foreign secretary last November, making him a peer in order to do so. Many find the practice of making outside appointments constitutionally suspect. However, the constitutional issue that requires rectification isn’t so much the way in which ...”

“... substantial biographies of Jane Austen within a decade smacks of excess. But, compared with Lord David Cecil’s A Portrait of Jane Austen (1979) and John Halperin’s The Life of Jane Austen (1984), the work under review is in so many ways the best that it deserves to make its mark. The three authors, moreover, approach their subject (or subjects) from ...”