“... the movement not only read Marx with the ease and lack of distance that we associate with reading Smith or Mill (studying any classic in one’s own language is a very different experience from scrutinising celebrated texts from another); they were also formed by the legacy of Benjamin, the presence of Horkheimer and Adorno, messages from Marcuse, the debut ...”

“... The abyss of history​ is deep enough to hold us all,’ Paul Valéry wrote in 1919, as Europe lay in ruins. The words resonate today as the coronavirus blows the roof off the world, most brutally exposing Britain and the United States, these prime movers of modern civilisation, which proudly claimed victory in two world wars, and in the Cold War, and which until recently held themselves up as exemplars of enlightened progress, economic and cultural models to be imitated across the globe ...”

“... many of Moore’s other novels. As he worked on the novel Moore wrote to the Irish Jesuit, Michael Paul Gallagher: ‘I find myself sympathetic to both sides of this argument (the Ecumenical and the Traditional) and so perhaps the story will work out.’ The drama is between the Abbot’s own worldly authority and the monks’ aggressive faith, between his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”