“... but at night he’s an amateur astronomer. He’s dismissive of fears that the association with John Wyndham’s 1950s novel won’t do the controversy-strewn world of GM any favours; and he’s done that clever thing of appropriating an opponent’s discourse: the Canadian triffid is an ironic (and more modern) riposte to all the talk about Frankenstein ...”

“... John Mortimer’s book has a thoroughly misleading title. It is designed to enlist a little pathetic sympathy for someone carried along like a piece of flotsam without the courage or determination to strike out for the shore. It would be difficult – judging from the book itself – to find anyone less shipwrecked than John Mortimer and less likely to pursue this policy if shipwrecked ...”

“... novel demonstrates, that it’s not. Two strands in the plot of Skagboys centre on the MacFarlan Smith chemical plant in Gorgie, just west of Edinburgh’s city centre. One concerns a scam to smuggle out pharmaceutical heroin to sell on the city’s black market. The other details an attempted heist of that heroin. MacFarlan ...”

“... Waldron calls a ‘laundry list of principles’. Fuller’s list is the most famous. Joseph Raz, John Finnis and Tom Bingham follow Fuller in proposing eight principles. Others have been more parsimonious: A.V. Dicey had three principles; John Rawls had four. Waldron pokes fun at this approach – ‘Robert Summers holds ...”

“... by life in small groups and communities.’ In spite of the scepticism of their betters – John Locke thought that ‘a middle-aged plough-man’ could ‘scarce ever be brought to the carriage … of a gentleman, though his body be as well proportioned, and his joints as supple’ – it’s clear to anyone who’s read the words of the ‘lesser ...”

“... Mellon Centre in London, which has now published it as this Dictionary, under the editorship of John Ingamells. The Dictionary is unique in its comprehensiveness. No traveller from the British Isles or the British colonies in America who was spotted anywhere in Italy has been omitted, even if no more than his or her surname is known. The Mellon Centre’s ...”

“... handled the countdown with more aggression and a lot more self-importance. The selector, John Hart, on their arrival in the changing room: ‘It’s going to be a long wait, boys. Time to concentrate.’ Then the coach Brian Lochore, voice breaking with emotion: ‘You’re a good team but you’re not yet a great team. If you win today you can say ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... liberalism, in the sense that we speak of scientific socialism. Rooted in the heritage of Adam Smith, it had a sense of the direction and dynamics of world history and (perhaps) the primacy of trade over production. As such, it was our only reality-based or materialist liberalism, for all that it produced a large superstructure of reformist political and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”