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“... Smith’s, it added little that was new. But Greenough knew enough about business to undercut the price of Smith’s map by a guinea or so. Smith wrote, in a rare display of emotion, that the Geological Society map ‘seemed like the ghost of my old map … mocking me in the disappointments of a science with which I could scarcely be in temper.’ Worse was ...”

“... not ‘market-friendly’. In this situation, mild market interventions such as temporary energy price freezes might be possible, but nationalising energy companies will not be seriously considered. This narrowing of democratic choice renders Westminster politics increasingly irrelevant to the lives of citizens, except in so far as it panders to spite: the ...”

“... prone to erupt into anarchy: organised, they could more readily be kept in line, even if the price was the negotiation of modest material concessions. This was clearly the interpretation which inspired the 1894 Royal Commissioners under the noble Duke of Devonshire; and it has obtained the endorsement of most modern Conservative governments. An ...”

“... important as the two-dimensional image. There are plenty of details in the exhibition catalogue by Richard Brettell (Yale, £16.95) which help you appreciate what is going on at brush-stroke level, but to test what is said you must go to the paintings themselves.In the pictures on show the size of the marks is large in relation to the size of the canvas and ...”

“... of the implications of the ‘privatisation’ of Kew in 1984. Since then we have seen the price of admission increase by a large amount and, most recently, a strike by its gardeners for better wages. The market now clearly holds sway over a space which Victorian politicians sought to open to the widest possible public. The changes forced on Kew by the ...”

“... that he doesn’t want to read any more books that don’t begin: ‘A shot rang out.’ Richard Cobb’s second volume of autobiography, nominally about Shrewsbury and Oxford, opens with a man getting off the boat train at the Gare Saint-Lazare wielding (well, almost wielding) a blood-stained axe. The killer, an old schoolfriend of Cobb’s called ...”

“... suffered the anachronism of his view. Like Larkin, with his perfunctory condescension to ‘A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple’, Thomas, so casually and at times so randomly managing his verse-lines, evinces a far greater contempt for the common man than Yeats or Lawrence or Pound, who so vehemently castigated that man for not being other than he ...”

“... well, I might as well pick up this old thing too.’ I hoped the volume was going to be Richard Bentley’s 1711 edition of Horace, which is full of his sometimes inspired and sometimes not so inspired conjectural emendations. When I got it home I found it was an English translation of Bentley’s notes on Horace’s Odes, along with ‘Notes upon ...”

“... of prohibition: the ‘only result’ of prohibiting the drug in Egypt had been ‘an increase of price to its consumers’. The Home Office did not want to legislate, but foresaw that ‘the prevalence of the vice in Egypt’ – despite prohibition there – might result in ‘international regulation of the drug’. This was prescient. A month later, the ...”

“... clocked up almost a hundred sales. That may not seem a lot, until you multiply it by the unit price of £30,000 (£5000 cheaper if you got in early). Chadwyck-Healey is a commercial publisher and the sales figures are now well past break-even into substantial profit. More important, enough databases are available for the establishment of an academic ...”

“... Vaizey has no doubt at all. ‘They were the best.’ Hugh Gaitskell, Iain Macleod, Richard Titmuss, Anthony Crosland and Edward Boyle. They were all ‘clever, honest, admirable and honourable’. They were all, except Boyle, who was at school at the time, affected by the slump. They were all excited by the political changes and administrative advances of the war ...”

“... what happens when we’re finished shopping?) Freedom wasn’t given freely, it came at a price, and the price was my entire life up to that point … Our everyday lives weren’t everyday lives any more, they were an adventure that we had survived, our customs were suddenly an attraction. In the course of just a ...”

“... wizard, Dr Schacht, presided over a regime of fiscal conservatism, at least on the surface. Under price controls, forced savings found their outlet in public spending, and devices like the Mefo-Bill helped conceal the costs of the rearmament programme. For it was rearmament which represented the big increase in spending and the crucial stimulus to the ...”

“... Duke of Norfolk existed to make sure that everyone performed their ritual to his satisfaction; no Richard Dimbleby existed to ‘sell’ the royal performances to the public. This would not have been an easy task, for the performers missed their cues, arrived drunk, took the wrong places and, in some cases, giggled throughout the ceremony – George IV’s ...”

“... bark their way ashore through the rushes. That’s how I felt reading the Tasmanian novelist Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning and almost universally adored (some reviewers reached for their Tolstoy; others forbade any comparisons at all) Narrow Road to the Deep North: watching tourists hoaxed by polystyrene. It used to be that a novel would put ...”