“... Hays, William Hazlitt, Thomas Malthus, Thomas Paine, Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, Charlotte Smith, John Horne Tooke, Sarah Trimmer, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Wordsworth, as well as a number of theologians and religious controversialists, of writers on science and medicine and so on, whose names were then far ...”

“... banality, Armstrong’s ‘small step’ is in every dictionary of quotations, and Andrew Smith is of the remarkable opinion that the First Sentence is ‘one of the most memorable lines ever offered the English language’ and ‘as famous as anything Shakespeare wrote’. Of the 12 Moon-walkers, only Schmitt was a scientist, and none of them was ...”

“... circumstances even impressive, the mere desire to have seems to many today – just as it did to John Locke – a furtive, even incipiently criminal form of lust. Disputes over property, and over the power which flows from it and flows back into it, are far from being the only major theme (let alone the motor) of human history. But for a number of millennia ...”

“... 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 quite different directions and differ greatly in their ...”

“... the relations between authors and publishers never change. Dear Mr Murray, edited by David McClay (John Murray, £16.99), a collection of letters written to six generations of the Murray family, is full of familiar complaints. Jane Austen was ‘very much disappointed … by the delays of the printers’. Maria Rundell, author of A New System of Domestic ...”

“... Forties and early Fifties. It showed its origins. Economically, development meant industry. Adam Smith and Marx, it was assumed, were right. Output could most effectively be raised by moving as quickly as possible to capital-intensive mass production. David Hume’s alternative, to think in terms of a ‘product cycle’, of simple agriculture at one end and ...”

“... to the writers who give each literary age its actual and particular flavour. Once it was Sir John Squire and Edward Shanks – obviously the most significant and influential voices of the time. During or just after the last war it was Connolly and Koestler and Spender, William Plomer, Alun Lewis, Dylan Thomas, Peter Quennell. Some still have life or fame ...”

“... is anything to go by, but it gave her no confidence. Finally she took up with a young Dutchman, John Lenglet, who came from a background as respectable as her own, though he was already married, to an actress, and was still not divorced when he and Jean celebrated their bigamous wedding in The Hague in 1919. Sasha in Good Morning, Midnight doesn’t like ...”

“... his style. Cambridge added to the mix the sense of Britain’s manifest destiny entertained by Sir John Seeley and his followers and William Cunningham’s brand of Christian Conservatism. The discussion of Baldwin’s youth is professedly intended by Williamson to exhibit a ‘model of how examination of an interwar politician’s early life can genuinely and ...”

“... epileptics began to hide themselves from public view, or else, as in the case of Prince John, the epileptic fifth son of George V, they were hidden away by their families. The rise of eugenics made things much worse. Eugenicists fixated on epilepsy as a hereditary threat to be tackled by both negative and positive countermeasures. By 1914, 13 US ...”

“... Adam Smith​ began his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by arguing that the division of labour was the key to the prosperity of advanced economies. It made the production of goods far more efficient, allowing the creation of cheap commodities that could be enjoyed by everyone. ‘The woollen coat,’ he writes, ‘which covers the day labourer, as coarse and rough as it may appear, is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen ...”

“... but even more was taken by the two older players in the leadership group, the captain, Steve Smith, and his right-hand man, David Warner, who had instructed Bancroft to ball-tamper. Smith and Warner were suspended for a year, Bancroft for nine months, and there was some question whether they would ever play for ...”

“... a national body of verse. When she does mention Scottish anthologists, editors and publishers – John Bell (The Poets of Great Britain), Robert Anderson (Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain) and Thomas Campbell (Specimens of the British Poets) – Bucknell doesn’t comment on the way they promoted through their works’ titles a ...”

“... On 15 June 2009, Gordon Brown announced an inquiry into the Iraq war – to investigate, as Sir John Chilcot, the inquiry’s chairman, put it, ‘the UK’s involvement in Iraq, including the way decisions were made and actions taken, to establish, as accurately as possible, what happened and to identify the lessons that can be learned’. Although oral ...”

“... and sculpture undermined art’s humanity. ‘Painting is made out of a love for the subject,’ John Minton repeatedly told his students at the Royal College of Art, in defiance of an abstract tradition that had resurfaced with Victor Pasmore’s 1948 abstracts. Pasmore became a leading member of the Constructionists: abstract artists who abandoned nature ...”