“... progenitors of modern legitimations of capitalist property rights, David Hume and Adam Smith, and at least regrettable that he should ignore entirely the intellectual background to their thinking so powerfully reconstructed recently by Istvan Hont in Wealth and Virtue. We begin with Locke, and with Locke more or less in midair. Even the final ...”

“... his mother chose to compete for the ardour of two of Caroline’s most famous paramours, Byron and Michael Bruce. Yet his emotional dependence and lack of ruthlessness prevented him from leaving her until his family pushed him into a separation in 1825. Jibes about his subordination to women probably had a permanently damaging effect on him; perhaps the need ...”

“... are not going to do the necessary regression analysis to make sense of it. John Curtice and Michael Steed also produce an immensely careful and laborious analysis of constituency results, their main conclusion being to confirm that the economy was not the master issue which moved the electorate. The Norris and Gavin volume contains a great deal more ...”

“... and Besant, having announced their intention, republished it, and were indicted, with what Keith Smith, in the Oxford History of the Laws of England, calls ‘evangelical indignation and hyperbolic fervour’, for ‘wickedly devising … to vitiate and corrupt … and to incite and encourage … indecent, obscene, unnatural and immoral practices, and bring ...”

“... the event has slipped British historical memory. I don’t imagine the topic will make it into Michael Gove’s ‘patriotic’ school history syllabus, and even at the time it was seen as something of an embarrassment. A war ‘undertaken against a nation so puerile in that art’, one military official wrote, ‘would better deserve the name of ...”

“... towards maintaining large, sunny open spaces, even in early prehistory. Twenty years ago, Alan Smith and other archaeologists proposed that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers would have found an advantage in enlarging and manipulating grassy areas where wild grazing animals gathered, and in encouraging nuts and berries to grow on the edge of the wood or in ...”

“... Maschler’s achievements as a general trade publisher rank him with Archibald Constable, George Smith, John Blackwood, George Routledge, Frederick Macmillan, David Garnett, Ian Parsons, Allen Lane. It was one of the most highly regarded of today’s younger publishers, Peter Straus (now an agent), who commissioned the book. None of these coat-brushers of ...”

“... collection that Greenberg didn’t miss the art he sold, but surely he winced as works by David Smith, Jackson Pollock or Morris Louis went out the door.* His enthusiasm for these artists, particularly Noland and Louis, undercuts the common misperception that he saw purity and flatness as modern art’s defining achievement. Greenberg came to distance ...”

“... leadership to rise from the ashes. Several prominent Tory Brexiteers, including Iain Duncan-Smith and Steve Baker, have military backgrounds. As with the Second World War, Brexit will perform an X-ray of our collective moral fibre. Remainers love facts, but are afraid of the truth. This is, I suspect, as close to a Conservative ideology of Brexit as ...”

“... right to shop where they liked. This reform propelled cost-conscious producers into W.H. Smith, where buying CDs was cheaper than renting them from the BBC music library, and away from the BBC’s fact-checking services, where checking pronunciation was charged at £12 a word. As a consequence of producer choice, the BBC closed down its ...”

“... called the Violet Quill had formed, and its members – Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White and George Whitmore, together with the film critic Vito Russo and the editor and academic George Stambolian – began producing books whose examination of gay life, though often programmatic, was still ...”

“... a year allowed himself to be lured away by Fortune. He soon grew restless there, too. He taught at Smith, SUNY-Stony Brook, Harvard, Black Mountain College, CUNY – yet none of them became a home. His New York apartment of longest tenure was a run-down sublet, to which he clung tenaciously. He moved in and out of the city. He lectured in Europe. He married ...”

“... escapism: Rushdie, Grass, Pynchon in his most recent novel, David Foster Wallace, even Zadie Smith. In novels by those writers, we have lately encountered terrorist groups with silly names, a genetically engineered mouse, two clocks having a conversation with each other, a giant cheese, a baby who plays air guitar in his crib, and so on. These kinds of ...”

“... are the few Englishmen in British India who gave aid to nationalists or Communists. One of them, Michael Carritt, has written a light-hearted account of his brief career in the Indian Civil Service.4 At vastly greater risk, a few Frenchmen in Algeria gave aid secretly to the rebels. Admirable too, though unlikely to be admired by Tories or Reaganites, is the ...”

“... in the 1930s sense, since the pulse of Orwell’s earlier fiction runs right through it. Winston Smith is a latter-day version of Gordon Comstock from Keep the Aspidistra Flying, stuck in a dead-end job (obliterating evidence that conflicts with the new version of history being put out by the Party) and living in a flat which is a futuristic version of the ...”