“... preferences was expanding into a biography when I last heard, while Alan Bell, whose work on Sydney Smith is drawing to a close, plans to move up the street in Combe Florey and produce ‘a biographical study’. Though a West Country recluse can hardly be the centre of a literary movement, the comparison with Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury is not ...”

“... and Washingtons, and all the other sages and heroes of [the American] revolution,’ said Sydney Smith in his ‘Who reads an American book?’ piece in the Edinburgh Review (1820), ‘were born and bred subjects of the King of England.’ The Tory Quarterly for January 1814, lamenting the victory in America of ‘democracy and Franklin’, had ...”

“... sea devils’ chasing him home. From Tahiti, ‘that fallen paradise’, he travelled to Sydney and platypi-shoots, on to the Cape, where he met Sir John Herschel (‘awful’ manners). Even then, FitzRoy – a stickler for precision – re-crossed the Atlantic to South America for more measurements before heading for Falmouth. Darwin arrived in ...”

“... popular while the normal diet grew heavier and indigestion became endemic. Good digestion, said Sydney Smith, ‘is the great secret of life’. The science of nutrition was slow to catch up. The Carlyles’ doctor’s advice to avoid vegetables did nothing to relieve their constipation, as Jane recounted in her journals. In expanding cities space was ...”

“... Two notables who figure in these pages in a very unfavourable light are that fun-loving clergyman, Sydney Smith, and the then unregenerate Tory, Gladstone. George Arthur, governor of Van Diemen’s Land or Tasmania from 1824, was a puritanically self-righteous person, convinced that mankind is ‘born and saturated in wickedness’ and that his wards, in ...”

“... not have been enough. Even if he was the personal and domestic paragon they all claimed he was, Sydney Smith wrote some years later, that didn’t mean he was a wise leader: ‘I should prefer that he … whipped his boys, and saved his country.’ His religion was of a simple kind, relying on his personal relationship with his God, which we now know ...”

“... music away in the cloisters.’Even those cloisters had not been encouraging. Sydney Smith, a canon of St Paul’s from 1831 until his death in 1845, complained that ‘it is enough if our music is decent … we are here to pray, and the singing is a very subordinate consideration.’ Churches of most denominations proceed along those ...”

“... David Kohn opens his monumental Darwinian Heritage with a deftly-delivered kick, observing that a study of the wider institutional culture of Darwin’s day seems to be ‘beyond the present ken of historians of 19th-century biology’. It’s a well-aimed blow. Little of the Darwin industry’s capital has been spent on exploring evolution in its social context ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In 1850 Dickens invented a little game for his seventh child, three-year-old Sydney, the tiniest boy in a family of short people. Initially, in fun, Dickens had asked Sydney to go to the railway station to meet a friend; innocent and enterprising, to everyone’s amusement the boy set off through the garden gate into the street; then someone had to rush out and bring him back ...”

“... infancy. ‘In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?’ the British critic Sydney Smith had asked in the Edinburgh Review in January 1820. By this point, only around eighty American novels had been published, and the best known was Charles Brockden Brown’s macabre Edgar Huntley (1799), although Washington Irving’s collection of ...”

“... for whom he has no other use. Equally, though the period had its rent-a-quote men, most notably Sydney Smith, he resists the temptation to overuse them. Among the best of his lesser wits is Agnes, estranged wife of the Anglican educationalist Joseph Bell. She persecuted her husband ingeniously by endorsing her letters to him on the outside with jokes ...”

“... and His Times, one of the most gleefully spiteful biographies ever written, the antiquary J.T. Smith describes Cosway, whom he had known, as ‘a well-made little man … very much like a monkey in his face’ and ‘ridiculously foppish’. If few contemporaries said the same in print, it was a not uncommon opinion. Cosway was nearly eighteen years older ...”

“... into the cacophony of what was called ‘Malthusianism’ through the 19th and 20th centuries. Sydney Smith said of the Essay that it was a book ‘much more talked about than read’, both by admirers and critics; certainly the later career of Malthusian thought and commentary breaks free of detailed engagement with the late 18th-century pastiche of ...”

“... either his own or somebody else’s. There is, indeed, much truth in this notion, for, as Adam Smith had implied, the market, together with its twin, private property, was the great invoker of city-building energies and the great though blind mediator of their outcome. But then in the last years of Victoria’s reign the great faults of the cities began to ...”