“... state is no more than a highly inconvenient and thus insignificant truth. The Scottish jurist T.B. Smith took the Union at face value and refused to accept the subaltern status of Scots law within what had become by default a Greater English state. Why, Smith asked, did Section 70 of the Army Act of 1955 incorporate the ...”

“... has something in common with the real thing as it would be written by Bishop or Plath or Stevie Smith. It is aware, too, of its own comic potentiality. So was a phrase she liked using at this time about ‘kissing the dead lips of Emily Brontë’. Unlike Barker, Elizabeth always expressed herself with the clarity of the true egotist. As recorded in By ...”

“... a sandboy. I could have imagined him swapping jests and odd bits of learning with Logan Pearsall Smith, the author of Trivia, and spellbinding the old dilettante with the tale, told tongue in cheek, of how a misdiagnosis giving him only a few more months to live had set him writing a few light novels to help support the missus after he’d gone ... Droll ...”

“... it ceased to be satire. In fact, it was a sort of apotheosis. Gilbert’s caricatures made W.H. Smith, Sir Garnet Wolseley and Oscar Wilde popular celebrities. Wolseley was so tickled by being portrayed as Major-General Stanley in The Pirates of Penzance that he learned the show-stopping ‘Modern Major-General’ patter-song and performed it at ...”

“... boasted about their powerful contacts in the Tory Party and the Government. Greer even mentioned John Major as ‘a close friend’. The programme-makers arranged further such meetings, one in a Spanish castle, to which Greer was asked to invite his contacts. Greer’s network of helpful politicians was about to be exposed when Central Television and its new ...”

“... Morgan and Davis are too politically correct for Johnson’s taste, he could have recurred to Adam Smith, who noted more than two centuries ago that in a political democracy it was all the more difficult to abolish slavery, since ‘the persons who make the laws in that country are persons who have slaves themselves.’The very ‘freedom of the free’, ...”

“... and there is no book on the modern British monarchy comparable in scholarly stature to Denis Mack Smith on the Kings of Italy. Dorothy Thompson’s study of Queen Victoria is thus the more to be welcomed, for she is a writer in a very different tradition from such conventional courtly biographers as Elizabeth Longford, Cecil Woodham-...”

“... his critique of existing religions and his justification for complete religious toleration. Steven Smith starts from Spinoza’s role as the first secular Jew (after his excommunication), and the way it is reflected both in his critique of religion, especially Judaism, and in his political theory. In both books, the excommunication of 1656 is the turning ...”

“... mostly American group made up by herself, Walter Berry, Howard Sturgis, Morton Fullerton, John Hugh Smith, Percy Lubbock and a few other initiates. She emphasises the man’s ‘quality of fun’, and her James is ‘the laughing, chaffing, jubilant yet malicious James’, not ‘the grave personage known to less ...”

“... as Darwin’s creationist predecessors thought, but good design doesn’t require a designer. Thus John Maynard Smith once defined biological adaptations as the sorts of trait that natural theologians would have mistaken as evidence for the creator; and it is the reason Richard Dawkins, while gleefully stamping all over the ...”

“... the provincialising of Calvinist attitudes in the writings of David Hume, Jonathan Edwards, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others. Far from a mechanical application of rigid doctrinal categories, Manning’s thoughtful critique shows how contradictory attitudes can arise out of, and in reaction to, a common adherence to ...”

“... he chooses to reveal now about himself and his co-founders Matthew Symonds and Andreas Whittam-Smith he might have found recruits hard to come by. Comparing his book with my own memory of events is an odd experience: the office furniture is the same, even the faces are, so why does everything look different? Of the trio who set up the Sunday paper, Ian ...”

“... bases and lots of appeal fora heritage readership. The Smiths (Stanford White’s wife was a Smith) are descended from a 17th-century judge and gave their name to the local town, Smithtown. They sound impeccably respectable and one of them married rich enough to leave the others piles of money. The Chanler clan, in the late 19th century, included II ...”

“... as an author photograph of him in existence, and such information as there is is recycled from John Fowles’s fighting introduction to this, his only book.) For a time in the 1920s he promised to be a literary figure, ‘the next D.H. Lawrence’ and then Lawrence’s intended biographer, but life had other, dimmer plans for him. The Book of Ebenezer Le ...”

“... years. The best painters of the period were their friends and fellow alumni of the Slade: Paul and John Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson, Edward Wadsworth, William Roberts and David Bomberg. They were all influenced, directly or indirectly, by Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibition of 1910, which introduced the British to Continental art, especially Cézanne, but they ...”