“... Venus and Adonis (anyone’s), Leviathan (it sounded like Decameron) and Self-Help by Samuel Smiles’. He also devises a literary test for immigrants comprising the opening lines of Piers Plowman. ‘You’d be surprised,’ he observes, ‘how many Indo-Chinese don’t know the average May mornynge temperature of the British Isles or where ...”

“... to their efforts because they too genuinely aspired to these qualities, and believed with Samuel Smiles that they were a recipe for individual advancement. This is fair enough, and is indeed already something of a historical commonplace on this side of the Atlantic. More problematic, however, is Himmelfarb’s contention that ‘a single standard ...”

“... were not particularly devout, but passed on a lasting respect for the ‘self-help’ teaching of Samuel Smiles. Not that his veneration of Smiles extended to self-help about the house, where his mother did everything for him; Briggs remained notorious for being unable to change a plug or drive a car.His school-leaving ...”

“... as partners in the quest. Vincent remarks that examples of ‘upward mobility’ such as delighted Samuel Smiles were rare: for one reason, because the grammar schools, which had furnished a ladder, were now less easy of access. There was some compensation in the ‘significant area of initiative in the field of schooling’ that was left to the working ...”

“... his prelims do not extend beyond antiquarian jottings entitled ‘Particulars of the Life of Samuel Pepys’, and he does not bother about such matters as cross-references or literary allusions. In general, he does not gloss obsolete phrases or special usages: he simply explains obsolete things (‘metheglin ... A liquor made of honey and water, boiled ...”

“... firm control over public expenditure, tax cuts, nationalism, “Victorian Values” (of the Samuel Smiles self-help variety), privatisation and a dash of populism.’ And the wrong definition? Why, of course, ‘whatever Margaret Thatcher herself at any time did or said’. She was, admittedly, ‘the indispensable element of the revolution which ...”

“... employment in the Glasgow region was more or less skilled) was, but was not, radically-inclined. Samuel Smiles was a Scotsman, and self-help and thrift were in his native air, inspiring the growth of co-operative societies and a most significant Temperance Movement, which arguably played the same role in the origins and early days of the Labour Party as ...”

“... Should a Person Be? she read a lot of self-help books, specifically one of the first: Self-Help by Samuel Smiles, published in 1859. The pragmatic Englishman gave details of great men’s lives – Walter Scott worked before breakfast, George Stephenson worked on his locomotive for 15 years before a breakthrough – as it was thought that copying them was ...”

“... had directed his sarcasm at more serious targets: Dead sick of himself after reading the book by Samuel Smiles (Know Thyself), a judge just drowned himself at Coulange-la-Vineuse. If only this excellent book could be read throughout the magistracy. Or: A policeman, Maurice Marullas, has blown out his brains. Let’s save the name of this honest man ...”

“... Mansfield’ by John Singleton Copley (1782) On one level, Mansfield’s was a model career and Samuel Smiles wrote of him with reverence. His wife, Elizabeth, to whom he was devotedly married for 46 years, was the daughter of an earl and the granddaughter of a lord chancellor. A dutiful but not excessively devout Anglican, he prospered at the ...”

“... account Appleyard gives of his life is much more than gossip. Rogers’s life is a subject Samuel Smiles might have relished. Fortune is kind one moment and frowns the next; great enterprises are undertaken, disabilities overcome. The six-year-old Richard Rogers arrived in England in 1938. His father, an Anglophile descendant of a North Country ...”

“... the end, are well-disguised personifications of old fashioned virtues – the Good Teacher and the Samuel Smiles hero – and better people than they at first seemed. Nice Work too, in an old-fashioned way, is just what it says it is. There is one further convention of the industrial novel, which Robyn conveniently expounds in her lecture on the ...”

“... old-fashioned head of an established church than has Archbishop Runcie. Not only are his sermons Samuel Smiles homilies, attacking trade unions, preaching the gospel of work, advising the blacks to pull themselves up by their bootstraps like the Jews, but he has strongly attacked the Anglican document ‘Faith in the City’ as being, in effect, a ...”

“... to Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759). In short, was Swift a monster, as Samuel Johnson nearly said: ‘The greatest difficulty that occurs, in analysing his character, is to discover by what depravity of intellect he took delight in revolving ideas from which almost every other mind shrinks with disgust.’ Sixty years after ...”

“... across the Channel. The first of these was the cult of sensibility, fuelled by the translation of Samuel Richardson’s novels. Weeping and smiling became evidence of sincerity and authenticity. The partition between emotion and its expression came down, and a person’s true self was supposedly revealed. If the face painted a picture of the soul, then it was ...”