“... or writing poetry or applying for life insurance, is an affair of the imagination. As a certain Richard Price explained in 1778, paper money must be thought of as the sign of a sign. If coin signified real value, paper, ‘owing its currency to opinion’, had ‘only a local and imaginary value’.* We have no choice but to re-imagine it daily. I looked ...”

“... who can be relied on to take the most permissive position of anyone in the room.’ Wesley Smith, author of The Culture of Death, offers a more sinister vision of the ethics business, depicting bioethicists as a self-appointed corps of elite liberals plotting to take control of the American medical and judicial systems. Critical essays and editorials ...”

“... Diversions’, Barrell produces two fine chapters on the ‘popgun’ plot and the strange case of Richard Brothers. Just before Hardy’s trial began, the London newspapers carried reports of an attempt to assassinate the King. Three members of the LCS – Peter Lemaitre, a watchcase maker, George Higgins, a shopman, and John ...”

“... in art school in LA – the New York of Judson Church and Yvonne Rainer, of Andy Warhol and Patti Smith and Lou Reed. It was disappearing as she arrived, as cities do. She wasn’t sure whether she should be a dancer or artist or filmmaker or writer or musician; what mattered was less what kind of artist than to be one, there. Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen ...”

“... stole the books that baffled me, the ones I couldn’t seem to solve. She was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia in 1917. Her father, Lamar Smith, was a jeweller who was forever tinkering with watches. Her mother, Marguerite, a more vivacious personality, had intended to name her baby Enrico Caruso and bragged ...”

“... aggressive and tempestuous’ thanks to their provision of popular diversions. Charles Saumarez Smith is unimpressed by the diligent cataloguing in which curators have engaged. ‘It has been assumed to be adequate to assemble as much information as possible which appears to pertain directly to the original circumstances of an object’s production without ...”

“... one of the reasons why they had failed. But, thanks to the willingness of the publisher, George Smith, to lose £70,000 on an outlay of £100,000, the DNB, ‘in accord with the self-reliant temperament of the British race’, was ‘the outcome of private enterprise and the handiwork of private citizens’. Thus conceived and completed, embodying ‘the ...”

“... In the London Review of Books, John Maynard Smith said about scientists: ‘however interested they may be in politics or history or philosophy, their first love is science itself.’ If only I could follow this bent, and tell something of Hamilton as a mathematician. As it happens, he also wrote a good deal of poetry, but his poems lack the magic of his equations, which seem more beautiful and moving now than when they were imagined 150 years ago ...”

“... guardians of Saxon virtue lodged in the Corporation of London. Chief among them was Joshua Toulmin Smith, founder of the Anti-Centralisation League and authority on the history of parish and vestry. In The Metropolis and Its Municipal Administration (1852), he argued against bringing the City of London under the remit of the 1848 Public Health Act and praised ...”

“... It’s hardly surprising that Sandy Arbuthnot falls for this sex goddess of espionage; even Richard Hannay is tempted: ‘I hated her instinctively, hated her intensely, but longed to arouse her interest.’ The idea of the vamp extracting secrets from hapless men is old, but took on a ” new life during the First World War, when spy fever raged. Tammy ...”

“... recorded for the edification of the future and the gratification of the present. The puritanical Richard Ingrams, who neither smokes nor drinks, and lives a scandalously chaste life, appears to many like some rumpled, corduroy-jacketed Robespierre (though Robespierre was a sybarite by comparison, diluting his water with wine). How has this change come ...”

“... for instance, offers his own brief allegory of the writer’s modern suspicion in The Information. Richard Tull, a novelist, hears birds singing in his garden, and thinks, mournfully: ‘say birds were just parrots and learned their songs from what they heard: those trills and twitters were imitations of mountain rivulets, of dew simpering downwards through ...”

“... nonsense and agreed with their own mindlessly reasonable practice. Edward Lucie-Smith even seemed to claim personal credit for setting Fuller on the right course: In Fuller’s early, hard-line Marxist days … I once told him that I would respect his criticism more a. if he wrote in a better style, and b. if he showed some sign of a sense ...”

“... to discuss his work with. He does more. He writes on Muñiz’s behalf to the influential Richard Owen of the Royal College of Surgeons. Will Owen arrange for the South American’s ‘wonderful collection of Fossil Bones’ to be shipped to the College, and will he, in addition to paying for this, send him some of the College’s publications? ‘I ...”

“... and the Attlee Government, lost their places on the National Executive to Harold Wilson and Richard Crossman, the candidates of the Left. Dalton sulked, but Morrison made a shrewd and emollient speech against self-gratifying Conference resolutions which failed to impress working-class voters. Crossman himself was booed for confessing his intention to ...”