“... kicking off with the overture to Susanna’s Secret by Wolf-Ferrari followed by Holst’s St Paul’s Suite. Through the concerts I regularly went to in Leeds Town Hall I was a fairly sophisticated music-lover and when the master in charge, the aptly named Mr Boor, said that he didn’t go for all this highbrow stuff, it was a small lesson that older ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by nearly 50 per cent since 2010, revealed unpopular plans to remove youth services, Iain Duncan Smith was derisive: If you look at the successful local authorities, they are the people who have worked out what the vitally important things are that they do, and have managed to get through this process without savaging the things that really matter. My only ...”

“... opposite upshot. The first was an empiricist, essentially British tradition descending from Hume, Smith and Ferguson, seconded by Burke and Tucker, which understood political development as an involuntary process of gradual institutional improvement, comparable to the workings of a market economy or the evolution of common law. The second was a ...”

“... still a gleam in the inventor’s eye, and even before us there had been other brothers – the Smith Brothers; the Brothers Karamazov; Dan Brothers, an outfielder with Detroit. It is the letter of the shyster lawyer he had always half wanted to be, but the joke was lost on the Warner Brothers legal department, who asked for an explanation of the ...”

“... she was a feminist of sorts: earthy and independent; muse to a host of eminent men (Stieglitz, Paul Strand et al); lived almost for ever. Best of all, she is supposed to have celebrated – fairly unabashedly – something called ‘female sexuality’. Who can contemplate those swelling pink and purple flowers – or the roseate canyon-wombs opening up ...”

“... set out to oppose. Significantly, the most radical demolitions of his edifice came from Denis Mack Smith in England, rather than any Italian historian. But if there was no real counterpart to the Historikerstreit in Italy, where De Felice could feel he had achieved most of his goals, there was also a less clear-cut shift of intellectual energies at large to ...”

“... at Ellingham Hall Assange was fast asleep. He’d been living there, at the house of Vaughan Smith, one of his sureties and founder of the Frontline Club, since his arrest on Swedish rape allegations. He was effectively under house arrest and wearing an electronic tag on his leg. He would sign in at Beccles police station every afternoon, proving he ...”

“... the publishers, then and later, rejected orchestral scores by some of the same women. Alice Mary Smith, nine years Claribel’s junior, was appointed Honorary Female Professional Associate of the Royal Academy of Music in the year of her death, 1884. She first attracted attention with a piano quartet at the London Musical Society, but was most famous for her ...”

“... regeneration. ‘There was this weird juxtaposition of civic pride and often grim reality,’ Paul Dutton, then the Journal’s Sunderland reporter, recalled. ‘Sunderland was trying to be upwardly mobile – “Look we have city status, look we have a Nissan car factory” – but, at the same time, there was a backlash over plans to build a university ...”

“... and readers rarely couple the names of Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson,’ Janet Adam Smith would write.In the houses where James’s novels are a long row in the study, most of the Stevensons are up in the nursery or in the schoolroom … Yet in their lifetime the two men were linked, not only by the closest ties of personal affection, but by a ...”

“... quid note. On one side we have a famous dead person: Elizabeth Fry or Charles Darwin or Adam Smith, depending on whether it’s a five or ten or twenty. On the other we have a picture of the queen, and just above that the words ‘I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of’, and then the value of the note, and the signature of the cashier of the ...”

“... her leverage.’ Others agreed, but they were all ignored, in favour of such sages as Iain Duncan Smith. ‘You have no idea how bad this is,’ Rogers told the cabinet secretary, Jeremy Heywood. ‘She’s put herself in an incredibly weak negotiating position. She’s blown herself up, she just doesn’t know it yet.’We know how it went after that ...”

“... to great thinkers of the African diaspora, W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, for example, Paul Gilroy.But Rose was also interested in what Hegel, following the novel-within-a-novel in Wilhelm Meister, called the ‘beautiful soul’. Goethe tells of a young woman’s withdrawal from the outer world, which expects her to fulfil her duties as a wife and ...”

“... ills.Could the left have defended a Lexit? The idea was floated by journalists like Owen Jones and Paul Mason in the early days of the campaign. Both quickly retreated when they realised that the mainstream left had nothing positive to say to its constituencies. They felt that supporting Brexit in the context of a campaign dominated by nationalists, bigots and ...”