“... When Hague lost to Blair just as badly four years later, Thatcher gave her support to Iain Duncan-Smith, helping him to see off Michael Portillo and Kenneth Clarke. When Duncan-Smith proved even less successful than his predecessor, he was replaced by another Thatcherite, Michael Howard, who went down to defeat against ...”

“... But his development of this appeal to recent history does not turn out very happily. He cites David Marquand as an influential exponent of the view that Britain’s cultural conservatism in the 20th century was the result of an ossification of the values of liberal capitalist individualism which had served their turn and had had their day. ‘Such a view ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... never been so low – certainly not since the 1640s and 1650s. ‘The House of Commons,’ Sydney Smith said in 1819, ‘is falling into contempt with the people.’ Taxes were high and times were bad, and journalists like William Cobbett were radicalising popular opinion by lambasting ‘Old Corruption’. Parliament, Cobbett stormed, was ruining the nation ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to this nouvelle vague of meekness, tendresse, womanliness, the glowing, melting sentiments, while David Hume, Adam Smith, Henry Mackenzie and James Macpherson weighed in from North of the border. The Irish were never just gorillas with gelignite. Those Irish historians who play down the anti-Irishness of the British for ...”

“... her real father and got Davis to adopt her. She began to lose her puppy fat. And she enrolled in Smith College – like all the so-called Seven Sisters, something of a finishing school for young ladies from the East Coast’s upper middle class. At this point, though, Kelley’s thesis (and it is her only one) that Nancy, like her mother, was an all-out ...”

“... a fine country house in Dumfries, called Craigielands, the family home of two of their number, the Smith brothers. Adam Forman married their sister, Flora Smith, and Denis was born and bred at Craigielands. Son of Adam describes the boy’s happy-seeming life on this estate and records his discontents. Young Denis enjoyed ...”

“... to have been the fate of almost all the cruise ships stranded by Covid border closures.Michael Smith and Jonathan Franklin tell the horror story of another plague ship, the Zaandam, owned and operated by Holland America, which left Buenos Aires on 6 March 2020. The cruise ship companies already knew that their vessels were hothouses for the mysterious ...”

“... the London 2012 Olympics, was appointed ‘PPE tsar’ in April. The Cabinet Office minister Chloe Smith was a Deloitte consultant before becoming MP for Norwich North at the age of 27. The owner of a small consultancy recently told me what happened when he went to Whitehall a few months before the pandemic to discuss a potential research project. A special ...”

“... well as the menu. An appearance of effortless sophistication is the middle-class ideal. Elizabeth David not only brightened postwar Britain with the flavours of the Mediterranean, she wrote in a way that reassured the large number of women and some men who were learning to cook for themselves that there was nothing demeaning about it. Her books are ...”

“... is involved: everything must be cared for, conserved, maintained and insured. In 2008 alumna Ros Smith and her husband, Steve Edwards, a pair of software entrepreneurs, gave the college £30 million. It’s the kind of money that buys your name above the door: it was at this point New Hall was renamed – Murray for its first president, the chemist Rosemary ...”

“... the hands of less enthusiastic publishers has been recorded in various gossip columns. Anne Smith, editor of the Literary Review, is a canny publicist for herself and her journal. Now, at last, we have this already much-read work to review. The Magic Glass is transparently a version of the author’s childhood, some thirty years ago in Fife (here ...”

“... up residence in my garden in 1974, living there in a van until her death 15 years later. Maggie Smith played Miss Shepherd on the stage in 1999 and all being well will star in the film with Nicholas Hytner directing. To date I’ve written two drafts of the script and am halfway through a third.The house where the story happened, 23 Gloucester Crescent in ...”

“... a research-based industry. The story has an economic rather than a religious moral. When Adam Smith talked of pens and the beauties of the division of labour, he might just as well have been talking about pencils; and following in his footsteps Milton Friedman, from a 20th-century vantage-point, considers the pencil to be ‘a neat lesson in free-market ...”