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“... to drench the parade of Enlightenment optimism about human possibility. The Radical writer Richard Price reckoned that an expanding population was a good thing, and that it would follow inevitably from more virtuous forms of government. Condorcet foresaw endless social progress, an egalitarian society in which technological advance would provide for an ...”

“... but it is a moot point how much effect they had in the political arena. Genuine innovators, like Keynes and Beveridge, tended to be eclectically empirical. Indeed, those contemporary writers who seek to unravel recent political history – especially the history of the Left – by studying the history of theory are in danger of anachronism. As Henry Drucker ...”

“... in Tennyson’s day the Apostles didn’t hop in and out of bed with one another, as they did in Keynes and Strachey’s. Most were flagrantly heterosexual (Hallam especially – the idea of sex between him and Tennyson is impossibly far-fetched), and the few who weren’t (like Richard Monckton Milnes, mad about ...”

“... soft socialists like R.H. Tawney. They may not all have willed the means proposed by Beveridge and Keynes (though an increasing number of them did) but most of them willed the end. They implemented the plans of their Labour masters not only dutifully but often with enthusiasm. It is most improbable, to put it no more strongly, that any social irruption could ...”

“... something on which he is rather an authority himself. Sir John Hicks sums up the issues between Keynes and Robertson with magisterial fairness and clarity. And Kenneth Rose reveals that Sir Frederic Hooper, the head of Schweppes, ‘detested the fizzy drinks upon which the prosperity of his firm depended’. One can only agree with that ...”

“... proprietor of the small yet reliable magazine Antichrist. This Ravelston – some composite of Sir Richard Rees and John Middleton Murry – was a hedonistic yet guilt-ridden dilettante, good in a pinch, and soft on poets, but too easily embarrassed by brute exigence. Saul Bellow – who has already shown a vulnerability to exigent poets in his wonderful ...”

“... fumble, it’s possible to look down on Chequers and away to the northern horizon where Milton Keynes will be built. Landscape has been politicised, subverted. The country weekend is now a strategic tool, an instrument of policy. The house where the Bembos erect a marquee for a society wedding is a stock heritage prop. It has passed through the levels of ...”

“... wave of population will break upon that shore, and roll back upon itself.’ John Maynard Keynes, who made no secret of his admiration for Malthus, attributed the First World War and the Russian Revolution to overpopulation and global competition for food. The ‘great acceleration’ of the second half of the 20th century, a period of unprecedented ...”

“... But Hamilton went further in putting his vision into practice. He worked hand in glove with two of Richard Arkwright’s former apprentices, Samuel Slater and George Parkinson, to set up America’s first water-powered cotton mill. Both men had sworn on oath not to disclose the secrets of Arkwright’s water frame, and they were also breaking British laws ...”

“... His grandfather, Thomas Blair, was a clergyman, not to be confused with the Rev. Blair of Richard Ingrams’s satiric imagination. (It is odd, incidentally, to read books which so regularly couple together the words ‘Blair’ – Orwell’s real name – and ‘socialism’.) But further back there was an earl, and the family had a heraldic crest ...”

“... like so many of his schemes at this time, nothing came of it, and the dismal science was left to Keynes and his contemporaries to wreak their particular brand of havoc through recessions, deficits and inflated, worthless currency on an unsuspecting world.’ Students of law at Western University in London, Canada, will be familiar with Professor Hunter’s ...”

“... In the course of the agitation against the Corn Laws in the early 1840s, the movement’s leaders, Richard Cobden and John Bright, gave encouragement to a proposal by a young Scotsman, James Wilson, to set up a weekly newspaper that would argue for the cause of free trade. But Wilson had no intention of being a mouthpiece for the Anti-Corn Law ...”

“... The economic model that was abandoned in the crisis is usually referred to as ‘Keynesian’. Keynes himself could be described as a ‘model case’ member of the liberal elite (in a non-pejorative sense of the term), a man whose moral, intellectual and cultural passions drove him to rethink the basic principles of economic policy. The paradigm that ...”

“... wonders how such land-bound creatures as the Spaniards managed to get to America at all. Did Sir Richard Hawkins say his latitude was 48°, three degrees north of where he ought to have been? Then he meant 50° 48' – ‘how so obvious an error got into the text is immaterial.’ He saw a peopled country with many fires? That could easily be the uninhabited ...”

“... of the US Federal Reserve in 1972 to raise interest rates and risk a recession that would weaken Richard Nixon’s chances of re-election. When Paul Volcker was made the Fed chair in 1979, he acted without regard for the potential political fallout, raising interest rates to nearly 20 per cent and causing unemployment to rocket; in 1982, it reached a high of ...”