“... Marxists have discovered, is pride in knowing your place and respecting your superiors. John Osborne’s autobiography A Better Class of Person (1981) is a sustained assault on that attitude in general and his mother in particular. It is no accident that, as Taylor quotes John Vincent saying, Margaret Thatcher was ...”

“... has never forgotten), but also worth reading seriously. In her fine biography of Buchan Janet Adam Smith earlier argued the case for the author: Dr Daniell develops her points and has little difficulty in proving the attacks to be the result of uninformed prejudice, based on little evidence, and that misinterpreted. It is certainly difficult to see how anyone ...”

“... They were all convinced that with Keynes, Beveridge, most of Whitehall, Transport House and even Smith Square behind them, they could do something towards a more decent society. They did not, of course, all always agree. ‘Crap merchant,’ said Crosland to Titmuss at Vaizey’s own wedding. But they were all radicals, and they were all, in Vaizey’s ...”

“... assembled to hear the claim. It was opposed on behalf of the Crown by the attorney-general, F.E. Smith. Although the High Court, and subsequently the Court of Appeal, rejected it, the case is of continuing interest for more than one reason. The courts at both levels accepted that the prerogative power of the monarch to appoint whom he chose to be a privy ...”

“... called Trinity (Moss). He goes on to fight the forces of evil, chief among them a certain Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving), who is endowed with irresistible menace, and in the process undergoes apotheosis, emerging finally as ‘the One’, to nobody’s very great surprise. All of which is of course guaranteed to please the crowds. The style, stunts and special ...”

“... in September by the Waywiser Press. In his obituary of Wollheim in the Independent last November, John Richardson wrote that Germs – which Wollheim thought ‘the best piece of work’ he had ‘ever done’ – ‘must not be allowed to become a chef d’oeuvre inconnu’. Now it will not, though Waywiser is a very small publisher without the marketing or ...”

“... nearly all the Jacobeans, while including a host of nonentities, such as Pomfret, Stepney, Dyer, Smith, Duke and King, was at the very least defective and misleading. The fault was not Dr Johnson’s. The guilty men, as a contemporary noted, were not ‘the illustrious scholar but his employers, who thought themselves … the best judges of vendible ...”

“... it could have belonged to someone else with the same initials – the Stratford draper William Smith, for instance – but the possibility remains strong that it was Shakespeare’s. It is certainly a genuine ring of the period, and there are other pointers in its favour. The field where it was found, Mill Close, was on land that Shakespeare had owned: it ...”

“... a fine country house in Dumfries, called Craigielands, the family home of two of their number, the Smith brothers. Adam Forman married their sister, Flora Smith, and Denis was born and bred at Craigielands. Son of Adam describes the boy’s happy-seeming life on this estate and records his discontents. Young Denis enjoyed ...”

“... German​ scholars used to worry about something they called ‘Das Adam Smith Problem’. There seemed to be two of him: one was the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, awash with warm-hearted fellow feeling; the other, the hard-nosed realist of The Wealth of Nations, a work which seemed to describe a world governed by a heedless disregard for anyone other than oneself ...”

“... mourners were Gypsy harpers and fiddlers, scholars, civic officials and ‘the painter Mr Augustus John’. ‘Hundreds of spectators,’ it was reported, ‘waited for the coming of the mortal remains of Dr John Sampson, the well-known philologist and librarian of Liverpool University.’ As a specialist in Romani he had ...”

“... for the US Senate; wrote 17 more novels; lived to memorialise (in essays in this book) his friends John Kennedy, Tennessee Williams, Italo Calvino, Orson Welles, Eleanor Roosevelt, Anaïs Nin ... In this kind of summary Vidal’s life sounds almost comically glamorous and eventful. One of the secrets of his social and professional success lies in the ...”

“... until the last half of this, the third game. A bit like not bothering to vote for Jospin say I. John was watching the game in a local French café called Gastro. On the final whistle he commiserated with the owner. ‘Of course,’ shrugged M. le Patron, in a what-do-you-expect way, ‘most of the team play in England.’ Superb. The Irish record in World ...”

“... to think – they bring about a new kind of social order: a ‘division of labour’, as Adam Smith called it, which fosters individual innovation and specialisation, and directs scarce resources where society needs them most. The problems affecting a mature capitalist system are obvious (trade cycles, unemployment, inflation and constant upheaval), but ...”

“... Thee’ and much that France still offers. There are writers he likes, most of them dead: Ronsard, John Clare, William Barnes (‘love of whose poems seems to me a litmus paper of the genuine’), Auden (‘the greatest of my contemporaries’), George Herbert, Vaughan, Crabbe, Hopkins, Whitman, Campion, Morris, Christina Rossetti, ...”