“... he sought to recover a lost critical tradition that reached back beyond Marx to Adam Smith. Some of the most enthusiastic early readers of The Wealth of Nations, he noted, were radicals who saw the work as a powerful indictment of aristocratic privilege. It was only after the French Revolution that the division between laissez-faire and socialism ...”

“... of the planet, some may involve feedback that helps life itself to continue,’ Peter Godfrey-Smith wrote in the LRB of 19 February 2015. ‘If they come about, they do so as fortuitous by-products of the evolution of particular living things.’ Andrew Watson, the co-creator of Daisyworld, later distanced himself from Lovelock’s insistence on ...”

“... shillings and sixpence. Each purchaser from Browning’s stall – or from that of his publishers, Smith, Elder – was therefore paying thirty shillings, or 360 pence, i.e. 45 times the price of the original. Like a canny Victorian merchant, Browning picked up his raw material cheap abroad, manufactured it into fancy goods, and sold it at a premium in his ...”

“... Protestant ideas had established only a superficial hold in England, the case goes, Cardinal Pole drew back from the strenuous evangelisation that was so urgently needed, and refused help from the Jesuits because he ‘simply did not want men with the fire of the Counter-Reformation in their bellies’. Over the last twenty years, this negative consensus has ...”

“... economics (Hayek), law (Schmitt), philosophy (Strauss) and history (Oakeshott) – but politics drew their concerns into a common field. There, they were divided by marked contrasts of character and outlook, and by the respective situations they confronted. The interweaving of themes and outcomes, across such differences, is all the more arresting. The ...”

“... a certain point he seems never to have spoken or responded to language again), he drew constantly, producing large, hypnotic images on brown paper bags or donated rolls of examining-table paper of the type you see in doctors’ surgeries. His characteristic subjects include arid Mexican landscapes and hills (often with train tunnels and trains ...”

“... was transformational. She recalled gawping at a neighbour, a senior mine worker, as a van drew up outside his house and dropped off a G Plan suite and a record player on a stand. The new wealth encouraged miners to take out loans, to buy on credit, to get mortgages, all of which meant that when the strike of 1984 came, they had more to lose. ‘It was ...”

“... with whom you want to spend prolonged periods of time. Reviewing Noakes’s biography, Stevie Smith observed that ‘another thing that bit upon poor Lear’s nerves when they were ageing – and bites upon ours as we read of them – are those endless travels.’ He was infuriating to himself and to others, an interminably perplexed celebrant of what he ...”

“... factual claims. The god Yahweh promised the land of Canaan to Abraham and his descendants; Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon from golden plates received from the angel Moroni; Jesus of Nazareth is seated at the right hand of the Father, and will return to judge the living and the dead. Religion, whatever else it involves, has an irreducible core of ...”

“... Moscow often commented on the exhaustive, repeated recitation of the tsar’s titles. For Thomas Smith in 1605 this was ‘ever their custom’. Miege, less patiently, described it as ‘troublesome and ridiculous’. And there is an element of absurdity even in Milton’s salutation, as though the list of fantastical-sounding lordships running from Moscow ...”

“... of Michael Portillo. The other candidates are unknown and rather unknowable, though Iain Duncan-Smith, the spear-carrier of Thatcherism, is not what the Conservative Party now needs. There appears, to an outsider, little ideological coherence to the contest. Clarke, a genially tolerant figure and a strong Europhile, has some surprising supporters, including ...”

“... draw well. Mark Rothko has ‘severe limitations as a draughts man’, as does Milton Avery; David Smith is ‘very uneven’, Magritte straightforwardly poor. Hughes’s tendency to argue both sides achieves poignancy in his famous, and well-deserved, attack on Julian Schnabel: ‘in Schnabel,’ he charges, ‘our time of insecure self-congratulation and ...”

“... and knife marks they found in the manuscripts – ‘hysterical mutilations’, Martha Nell Smith calls them in her study of Dickinson – might have been Austin’s doing, as Mabel told her daughter they were. In fact, they were Mabel’s work. She meant to obliterate all traces of her rival even if it required the gagging of the poet and the ...”

“... to allow bitterness to linger. Two of the poem’s other translators, Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith, describe its ‘exquisitely subtle blend of ferocity and tenderness’. ‘Let my heart preserve me from all hate,’ the narrator intones. He also draws back from some of the more celebratory aspects of racial self-pride, laughing at his own ‘former ...”

“... more modest than those of their neighbours and their home bordered the railroad. As a child, Evans drew and painted and often retreated to the secret worlds of books and diaries. When he was older, he took snapshots of ordinary things and put them in albums (‘Pair of pants – Hamilton, Montana – 1916’). He also became an obsessive drawer of ...”