“... privacy of the self, along with the growth of possessive individualism, that gave rise among Adam Smith and others to the 18th-century cult of imaginative sympathy. If people in their natural state are impenetrable to us, we need some special faculty that allows us to recreate from the inside how they are feeling. And fiction is a paradigm of this. But ...”

“... Wat Tyler (by Ros Faith), observations on George V’s Silver Jubilee as celebrated in Kenya (by John Lonsdale), a powerful dissection of the problems of writing the history of the Communist Parties (by Perry Anderson), and reference to an Italian cowherd who constructed his own version of the Odyssey because he found the original too long to memorise. There ...”

“... and its vicarage sit on a large parcel of land. (As Tawney might have predicted, the vicar, John Perkins, a bookish man who kept a lock on his study door, is far from being a spiritual leader.) Poorer dwellings are shown by dense clusters of tiny red dots, often in more remote areas. ‘A house with a lean-to’ yields a cache of information about a ...”

“... life, real wisdom, and the surest and readiest means of obtaining both safety and advantage. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments On 13 March President George W. Bush wrote to four Republican Senators informing them that he would not be ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, aimed at reducing worldwide emissions of ‘greenhouse’ gases, especially carbon ...”

“... of The Birth of Steel within a few days. The plot tells how a Medieval alchemist – aptly named Smith – is baffled in his attempts to fashion a steel sword: mocked by his minions, he appeals to Minerva, Goddess of Wisdom, who thereupon enters in majesty and introduces the instruments of modern science. The open-air production took full shape during ...”

“... after she had achieved publication, problems remained. In a letter written to her close friend Bob Smith (who published the first appreciative essay on her novels) Barbara Pym lightly passes on the information from Cape that ‘8 Americans and 10 Continental publishers saw and “declined” ... Excellent Women and they are still plodding on with [Jane and ...”

“... of modern print technology. We are at the dawn of a new technological age: what Anthony Smith describes as ‘the third revolution in communication’ – the others were the invention of writing and of printing. The computerisation of print through electronic technology opens up the possibility of an abundance of information becoming universally ...”

“... tied to the fact that it was morally better. It’s a claim that ultimately goes back to Adam Smith in the third book of The Wealth of Nations. In one sense it is the climactic claim of his whole argument: ‘Commerce and manufactures gradually introduced order and good government, and with them, the liberty and security of individuals, among the ...”

“... Register called it ‘Silly Billy’s Tomfoolery’ and dismissed its ‘indecent trash’. John Bull said that ‘the dirty abominations of the raffs of literature are far below notice,’ then devoted three issues to reviews, spoofs and comments on the book. They even got hold of one of his letters to her, and published it (thus, ironically, doing a ...”

“... He then rejoined in 1954, in protest at the conviction of Party leaders under the draconian Smith Act – before leaving for a second time when the convictions were reversed. In his later accounts he suggests that the HUAC affair didn’t have ‘anything at all to do with the Communist Party’, that it was really about ‘the USA and its traditions ...”

“... to convey his condemnation of Charles’s beheading. For the Royalists, Muhammad was Cromwell; John Milton and other Parliamentarians responded by equating Charles with the prophet. Those who idolised the king as a martyr had ‘stolen the pattern from Mecha’, Milton wrote. Muhammad had been an all-purpose heresiarch, but now he devolved in the European ...”

“... never did, to work his critical observations up into a coherent theory; others, like Grover Smith, read what he had read, so far as this could be ascertained, and examined his sources with what looked like, but cannot quite have been, exhaustive care: for recently there has been a boom in such research. A procession of students combs the archives in New ...”

“... Shrew was about. My co-star in the Shakespeare and who played Beecham in The Chiltern Hundreds was John Scaife, a friend whom I lost sight of after university and only this last year discovered had become a distinguished molecular biologist at Edinburgh, but died young (in the 1990s) from Aids.17 January. Rupert returns from a walk with Owen, his brother, and ...”

“... According to John Cheever, 1948 was ‘the year everybody in the United States was worried about homosexuality’. And nobody was more worried than the federal government, which was rumoured to be teeming with gays and lesbians. One might think that Washington’s attentions would have been focused elsewhere – on the Soviet Union, for example, or on Communist spies – but in 1950, President Truman’s advisers warned him that ‘the country is more concerned about the charges of homosexuals in the government than about Communists ...”

“... is usually true, nor do the proponents of such ideas fall into predictable political camps. Joan Smith, quoted by Watt, blows John Berger’s famous dictum that ‘men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’ smartly out of the water as just another male fantasy. If they are interested in clothes, women ...”