“... MacNeice, Dillon, Cleverdon and Bridson, and new ones like W. R. Rodgers, Terence Tiller, R. D. Smith and Rayner Heppenstall. MacNeice was henceforth one of a group of literary men whose social life revolved around certain pubs in Soho, Fitzrovia or the immediate environs of Broadcasting House. Dylan Thomas was much in use as an actor and a voice as well as ...”

“... effect, only two theories of evolution have ever been put forward,’ writes John Maynard Smith, ‘one, originating with Lamarck ... the other originating with Darwin.’ Such reduction of the scientific corpus to patterns of mutual exclusivity doubtless tells us something about the strategy, if not the logic, of scientific corroboration. It is a ...”

“... successfully did in 1931. The question is, who comes closest to Baldwin? In some ways, it is Michael Ancram, a traditional figure who could probably hold the Party together better than the other candidates. But, unlike Baldwin, he represents the Party’s past rather than its future. The obvious answer is Ken Clarke. He had the support of the Party ...”

“... life, real wisdom, and the surest and readiest means of obtaining both safety and advantage.Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral SentimentsOn 13 March President George W. Bush wrote to four Republican Senators informing them that he would not be ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, aimed at reducing worldwide emissions of ‘greenhouse’ gases, especially carbon ...”

“... those quotations from Defoe. For most of the past two hundred years, since the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, a serious financial authority (which Defoe was in his time) who suggested that credit markets were ruled basically by irrationality, whimsy and chaos would himself be regarded as suffering from ‘a sort of lunacy’. Yet the events ...”

“... manuscripts to do with the Society, were edited by Mary Thale and published twenty years ago. Now Michael Davis has collected and edited all the many publications of the LCS. They fill four large volumes, to which Davis has added a volume of contemporary pamphlets, mainly by its supporters, and a further volume of Parliamentary debates and Government reports ...”

“... the role of Bryan and the director kept saying: ‘More pompous, Morone. Make him more pompous.’ Michael Kazin is a fine historian who specialises in the lost causes of the left. He has written sympathetic books on the Populist movement and the 1960s. In A Godly Hero, his life of Bryan, he now draws an unexpected conclusion: defying capitalists and defending ...”

“... filming in Ilkley. Nothing untoward occurred until the evening, when I was taken out to supper by Michael Palin and Maggie Smith. Came my salad of mixed leaves and there, nestling among the rocket, were several shards of broken glass. ‘Very mixed,’ said Miss Smith. ‘No,’ said the ...”

“... editor. We had a committee consisting of John Fuller, Francis Hope, Martin Dodsworth, Colin Falck, Michael Fried and Gabriel Pearson. We never had meetings or anything like that. There was a lot of correspondence, because John went to Buffalo for a year. So he wrote to me a lot from there. And Michael and Colin had already ...”

“... lampshade?’ Here and in his more gnomic utterances (‘We are watching some dreary music by Michael Tippett and Daddy keeps saying: “When does the shooting start?”’) Fitzgerald also surely owed something to E.M. Delafield, whose Diary of a Provincial Lady appeared in Time and Tide in the 1930s and whose ‘Robert’ is similarly laconic, impassive ...”

“... is a tantalising suspicion of bitterness when the wine hits the top of the palate.’ Christie’s Michael Broadbent recently recalled the heyday of this style: I do like a bit of pure poetry, my favourite author being the late and great André Simon. At the end of a lunch at the Hind’s Head in Bray . . . his host asked Simon for his first reaction to the ...”

“... of the British debate, this is an arresting sentiment. There are ministers who also favour EMU: Michael Heseltine and Kenneth Clarke both admitted as much last November, and in that small part of his heart which can afford to rise above political calculation, Major is probably an EMU man as well, when the time is ripe, as they all say. The trouble is that ...”

“... If​ universities had been an invention of the second half of the 20th century,’ Michael Dummett wondered in his last book, The Nature and Future of Philosophy (2010), ‘would anyone have thought to include philosophy among the subjects that they taught and studied?’ Dummett’s anxiety wasn’t whether philosophy could survive at a time when the value of a university education is gauged in increasingly reductive, economic terms ...”

“... have been that Dahl (who anyway loved a put-down) shared a friend with Green, the painter Matthew Smith, whose work he did know and like. For surely Dahl could have had little time for an avant-garde writer like Green? Besides, Green was just the kind of Eton-and-Oxford Englishman who had made him feel so alien and unappreciated in the London literary world ...”

“... of all Scots’, so there is some excuse for me. On the other hand most of us have heard of Michael Miliken, of whose Law-like career Buchan offers a vivid sketch. He could ‘create money with a single sentence’, his salary in 1986 was $550 million, which, on the Buchan-approved capitalisation model of Sir William Petty (20 times one’s annual ...”