“... The understanding seems to claim an inevitability which the tale actually lacked, for George Smith of the Cornhill applied his guillotine by only allowing it a limited number of issues, at a time when Mrs Gaskell was still hesitating over how to end it. She gave up in despair, and had recourse to the most hackneyed of Victorian fictional formulas. ‘I ...”

“... of custom or ramshackle representative democracies. The old notion, going back at least to Adam Smith, that the untrammelled pursuit of individual monetary self-interest would secure the public good, has been radically simplified: there is no public good, because there is no public (Mrs Thatcher’s ‘no such thing as society’) and no good, unless it be ...”

“... enemy’. The research of social historians of the Russian Revolution, such as Diane Koenkov, S.A. Smith and Ronald Suny, has shown that the Bolshevik leadership in and immediately after 1917 was not only more susceptible to pressure from the masses than might have been thought, but driven by events as often as it directed them. It is also remarkable that ...”

“... one will not find much in either Michael Leapman’s sympathetic and readable portrait, or John Cole’s lively and good-humoured canter over the events of the last decade, to change one’s mind. The nature of the Labour Party’s – and Kinnock’s – problem was vividly illustrated by what happened when James Callaghan resigned the leadership late ...”

“... him. The writer of these letters – the bulk of them addressed to his first wife, Alys Pearsall Smith, and to the woman who liberated him from the ruins of that first marriage, Lady Ottoline Morrell – must strike most readers as someone who, even in his early forties, was unequipped for adult emotional life. This volume, stout as it is, inevitably gives a ...”

“... For​ the wit, Whig and clergyman Sydney Smith it was ‘the golden parallelogram’. The area bounded by Hyde Park to the west and Regent Street to the east, extending north to Oxford Street and south to Piccadilly, enclosed ‘more intelligence and ability, to say nothing of wealth and beauty, than the world had ever collected in such a space before ...”

“... vigorously: over-vibrating concrete would shake the gravel to the bottom.’ He finds that even John Betjeman, the arch-Victorianist and founder of Private Eye’s ‘Nooks and Corners’ (originally called ‘Nooks and Corners of the New Barbarism’), admired the design, to the point where he wrote a letter of appreciation to Lasdun: ‘I gasped with ...”

“... that they’re new than that they’re young. Jack agreed. Few I suspect would go as far as John Sutherland (64) – the irrepressible champion of Salman Rushdie (55), whose most recent novel, Fury, wasn’t otherwise very well received – who has said he thinks novels shouldn’t be written by people under 50. Despite all of which, the most media ...”

“... have anything definite in mind, it must be that The Principle of Duty puts the work of Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, David Hume and Edmund Burke in the shade. The Principle of Duty not only fails to live up to its billing: it is quite dreadful. It is querulous and pompous, written in a sort of demented lawyer-speak, full of misreadings of the writers ...”

“... At some time in the 1730s Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, Midlothian, wrote down advice on the building of what he called ‘a family house’. This should consist of a central main block and two side pavilions, as a precaution against destruction by fire. ‘The main or chief Body of the House ought to be at Least double the Bigness of each pavilion and may serve chiefly for lodging the Master of the family and the better kind of Guests who come to visit him ...”

“... guns, thereby beginning the cycle of trade all over again. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith ascribed the relative lack of African economic development to the ‘continual danger’ that supposedly confronted the continent’s inhabitants. In a sentence that defined the problem legitimate commerce sought to address, Thomas Malthus went ...”

“... pictorial music, in which its factual content has no active part. As Jason Rosenfeld and Alison Smith, the curators of Millais, the Tate’s endlessly surprising new show, point out in the catalogue, the painting is an early harbinger of the Aestheticism that would swing into vogue during the 1860s.* Not long afterwards, Millais was painting harmonic ...”

“... could not recognise them unless they spoke to him. Take Cabinet colleagues – for example, W.H. Smith. At a breakfast party during his ministry of 1886-1892, Salisbury asked his host who it was sitting on the host’s left. The host must have found this an odd question, because the man was Salisbury’s deputy and long-term colleague, with whom he was then ...”

“... role. This is a life which is simply going through the motions, doggedly repeating its lines. John Nower’s fate appears determined in advance by the blood feud he inherits. His only destiny is to revenge his father’s murder and so perpetuate the feud. The strange fusion of Anglo-Saxon attitudes and up-to-date allusion (cars and gangsters and ...”

“... has been honest enough to admit that today’s Telegraph is a far better paper. Andreas Whittam Smith, on the other hand, who left the Telegraph to found the Independent, felt so strongly about Deedes’s failure to respond to the Telegraph’s decline that he has never spoken to him again. Whittam Smith regarded Deedes ...”