“... it once had been. The cause of this sad decline was bad diet. The fruit of the tree from which Adam and Eve were permitted to eat conferred immortality; the forbidden fruit gave knowledge of good and evil; and the price paid for dietary indiscretion was expulsion from paradise and, therefore, from access to the Tree of Life. No more low-hanging fruit: from ...”

“... Such attitudes, we’ve been taught to recognise, weren’t proof against the old imperial Adam, who lurks in all occidentals, and is culturally and intellectually, as well as politically and commercially, predatory. Johnson’s occasional interest in visiting India may have included some idea of making his fortune, though he mainly expressed ...”

“... local schoolchildren, all walking in time to regimental trumpets and the inane jingling of morris-dancers, the Immortal invoked and perhaps appeased by all this partakes at once of municipal worthy, folk hero, national icon, monarch, pagan god, Catholic saint and Messiah. (The last analogy is made all but inescapable by the name of Shakespeare’s ...”

“... reported to Alice, ‘plain-faced, ladylike (in black silk & black lace)’, and visited William Morris and his family. Mrs Morris was ‘a figure cut out of a missal … It’s hard to say whether she’s a grand synthesis of all the pre-Raphaelite pictures ever made – or they a “keen analysis” of her – whether ...”

“... not to be missed’. The best-publicised painted room of the last year or so was, after all, Adam Ant’s. The Omega rejection of pastel-toned Edwardian decoration sprang from a nursery anarchy which is at least as well understood by today’s style-hungry young as the tribal uses of African masks were in Fitzroy and Gordon Squares, while the Omega ...”

“... for my paper, I told them, which that morning had published two pieces (by James Butler and Adam Tooze) about Andreas Malm, the Swedish climate theorist and author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Malm says it’s time, I said, for climate campaigners to move on from XR-type theatrics to disciplined sabotage of fossil-fuel infrastructure; everything is so ...”

“... are Betjeman’s Shell county guides – and his technique is comparable to that used in Adam Thorpe’s short story ‘In the Author’s Footsteps’, in his new collection, Is This the Way You Said?* Here an obstinately backward-looking rambler uses old maps and guidebooks acquired from second-hand bookshops to plan his assaults on present-day ...”

“... The theme struck by The Fable of the Bees has been pursued for more than two centuries, by Adam Smith, Malinowski, Merton and many others. To cite just two examples: income inequalities are justified by their positive effect on savings, investment, average income and ultimately on minimal income; political apathy is seen as a functional prerequisite ...”

“... state of affairs that exists is what Hill came to call, in a favourite phrase taken from William Morris, ‘plutocratic anarchy’, or ‘Anarchical Plutocracy’, or ‘oligarchic democracy’, or ‘oligarchic mob rule’, something which became a preoccupying theme. ‘I think at certain periods in our history some good poets have felt they have a ...”

“... Bridge and the Adelphi. The destruction of the Adelphi was deemed ‘inevitable’ by the William Morris scholar John Drinkwater, as though to oppose it would be derisive of the common mood. Robert Byron, less precious than usual, regretted that ‘according to official and ecclesiastical standards … a bit of the old Roman wall is of more importance than ...”