“... heir apparent, Gordon Brown. These men are to Jenkins Thatcher’s political ‘sons’, with David Cameron trotting along behind as a ‘grandson’. (The book was completed before Cameron’s Conservatives abandoned any formal adherence to the Thatcherite slogan of reducing the role of central government.) In the process, Jenkins says, Thatcherism lost ...”

“... the 17th century that would challenge what she and her friends saw as the Tory version supplied by David Hume. The first volume was an immediate bestseller when it appeared in 1763, and so to a lesser extent were its four successors which were all published before 1773. Insisting on and obtaining what was then the quite extraordinary sum of £1000 per ...”

“... the French Ambassador. The patriotic hero, it turned out, had venally conspired with foreigners. David Hume, who had earlier mocked the Sidney cult, found it ‘amusing to observe the general and I may say national rage’. Shortly after the exposure of Sidney, John Wilkes – in the House of Commons, of all places – extolled Cromwell’s ...”

“... now if one who comes of the same stock has not a right to give his opinion in such like cases. David Hume liked this story, and in 1741 retold it in his marvellous essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, where he wrestled with the question of whether such delicacy of judgment was really possible. Some people doubted any such thing, but he did ...”

“... court of Lorraine, at Lunéville. She was fat, looking in her portrait by Tocqué a little like David Hume (her friends called her ‘La Grosse’); also hopelessly disorganised, full of neurasthenic aches and pains, and a great groaner and complainer – but this last somehow in a companionable fashion, showing she was as interested in ...”

“... beneficence and humanity … or whatever proceeds from a tender sympathy with others’ (David Hume). Fashionable poems deplored slavery and child labour, and wrung tears from the public on behalf of the distressed. Sterne assured his readers that his purpose in A Sentimental Journey (1768) ‘was to teach us to love the world and our fellow ...”

“... in England in the 1720s, became the subject of intense debate among Enlightenment men, including David Hume, James Ramsay and Edward Long. Were Africans different or were they ‘the same’? Could they write poetry? Could they claim gentility? Long devoted an entire chapter of the History to an attempted demolition of Williams, a man who represented a ...”

“... mortality levels. At some point in their lives Adam Smith, John Miller, William Robertson and David Hume began to question the theology in which they had been reared: Camic is convinced that ‘their revolution was a union of circumstances’ – in other words, that it was their rearing which freed them for it. That Adam Ferguson did less original ...”

“... of a very old idea: the Quantity Theory of Money. This theory, clearly present in the work of David Hume and David Ricardo, was formalised in the work of Alfred Marshall, A.C. Pigou and Irving Fisher at the beginning of this century. With the rise of Keynesianism, however, the primary lesson of the old-time ...”

“... between them) that can be found in thinkers from Isaac Newton and John Locke to Adam Smith and David Hume. What Kind of Creatures Are We? reprints a series of lectures Chomsky delivered at Columbia University, with a lucid foreword by the philosopher Akeel Bilgrami. The second lecture, ‘What Can We Understand?’, opens with an avowal of ‘the new ...”

“... that obedience to natural law means ‘that every man shall pursue his own happiness’ (echo of David Hume and foretaste of Bentham himself?). The puzzle is rather, as Ross Harrison suggests in his discussion of Bentham’s thought as a whole – a considerable achievement – why Bentham did not enlist natural law as an ally of utility: they had much ...”

“... David Hume once remarked that the English had the least national character of any people in the universe. Perhaps this was a cunning Scottish put-down, since character is just what the English pride themselves on. They may not bestride the world in intellect, cuisine or emotional intimacy, but these fancy pursuits can be left to foreigners, and don’t count for much compared to their own moral robustness ...”

“... Christian martyrs, monks, Abelard and Héloïse, the troubadours, Dante. Next she moves on to David Hume, Goethe, Byron, Casanova, before concluding with a smattering of Netflix scripts and YouTube comments. Is this a history of love? Or a history of certain ideas about love? As the historian of China Eugenia Lean has argued, the ‘single ...”

“... of narrative, in other words, raises the problem of what, if anything, persists over time. David Hume thought for a while that nothing did; others have proposed the soul, the body, the brain and so on. Whatever the candidate, fictional narratives might help us to see continuity in ways other than the straightforwardly linear. What lends ...”

“... of Thomas Gray, Allen Ramsay and Oliver Goldsmith, casually mentions that he does not need to read David Hume on miracles, and obliquely compares his own work with that of Milton? There is a paradox here: the more Bewick strove to establish his credentials as an artist, the more apparent it becomes that he was not the bon sauvage he was portrayed to ...”