“... who cared greatly about her blonde, pink and sometimes overweight appearance – was pleased when John Holms told her she looked like ‘a something Queen Elizabeth’. The missing adjective was ‘Surbiton’, which she would not have liked, though she was capable of accepting far crueller truths about herself than most people could dream up for her. She ...”

“... names and now meaningless events: Yesterday I introduced James to Mrs Inman; – in the evening John Bridges returned from Goodnestone – and this morn before we had left the Breakfast Table we had a visit from Mr Whitfield, whose object I imagine was principally to thank my Eldest Brother for his assistance. Poor Man! – he has now a little intermission ...”

“... his finances; perhaps Pushkin was thinking of him when he wrote that Onegin had read his Adam Smith – unlike his father, who ‘could not understand him,/and mortgaged his lands’. Pushkin’s father was dilettantish and literary; Pushkin’s uncle, Vasily, was an established though mediocre poet, most remarkable, it seems, for his last words, recorded ...”

“... 1505, she grew up, probably, on her father’s estates in Essex. Jane’s mother was Alice St John, daughter of a Bedfordshire landowner. Her father was Henry, Lord Morley, the scholarly translator of Petrarch and Plutarch. David Starkey begins an essay on Lord Morley by wondering whether we should class him like Prufrock as an ‘attendant ...”

“... diplomat, Helen DeWitt grew up in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador … She started a degree at Smith College and dropped out twice, the first time to read Proust and Eliot while working as a chambermaid, the second time to take the Oxford entrance exam … In 1988 she started her first novel. Over the next decade she started work on around fifty ...”

“... economic and social policies which were explosively incompatible and which eventually did for John Major’s Government, and a reckless ‘re-engineering’ of the country’s social structure which ultimately went disastrously wrong for the Tories. She brought into being a middle class which, it turns out, has no overriding loyalty to the Conservative ...”

“... ran against Trump in the primaries; the two most prominent Republicans in the host state (Governor John Kasich and Senator Rob Portman); and scores of Senate and Congress members, governors and mayors nervously up for re-election, facing the prospect of having to defend or refute whatever would be Trump’s latest wacky pronouncement and losing voters either ...”

“... Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy Smith, Daniel Soar, Olena Stiazhkina, Vera Tolz, Daniel Trilling Sofia Andrukhovychtranslated by Uilleam BlackerOn​  the first day, we hid in the Mins’ka metro station with our dog, Zlata. The entire platform was covered with people. We found a little gap ...”

“... that money – especially self-creating money, or capital – corresponds to God, with Adam Smith as patriarch and classical political economy as the Bible. Rather like Rorty, he had a zeal for saving his fellow leftists from absolutist delusions: that is why he exhorted them to treat the mystery of capital rather as atheists treat the mystery of ...”

“... or terrorising. The unconscious is sociable, even convivial. ‘The good news,’ Joseph Smith and William Kerrigan write in their commentary on Rorty’s essay, ‘is that what goes on out of awareness can also be one’s ally.’ The ‘also’ here is doing all the work. Whether or not there is something novel in Freud’s view of the ...”

“... in her search for new ideas she could bring to the fight. She read heavyweight books – Adam Smith, Burke, Popper, Hayek – and carefully noted their contents. She enjoyed talking about these writers when she got the chance. But did she really understand them? One of the questions that has always dogged Thatcher is whether she was intellectually ...”

“... he was one of themselves. But Sonnet 20 proves conclusively that he was sexually normal.’ Hallet Smith said of Sonnet 20: ‘The attitude of the poet toward the friend is one of love and admiration, deference and possessiveness, but it is not at all a sexual passion’; Robert Giroux that the feelings in the poems ‘do not represent the feelings of an ...”

“... in the 1990s was self-imposed. But as Georgina Born makes clear in her definitive analysis of the John Birt and Greg Dyke eras, the consistent impetus came from government. It’s no surprise that Margaret Thatcher wanted to take on the BBC – if anything, the surprise is how long it took her. (In her first term, Thatcher’s main concern was with BBC ...”

“... had not always got on. ‘When it comes to lying,’ Mailer warbled to gossip-columnist Liz Smith of the New York Daily News in the mid-Eighties, ‘Larry Schiller makes Baron von Munchausen look like George Washington.’ Yet at the beginning of this new book there is an appreciation: ‘to Larry Schiller, my skilled and wily colleague in interview and ...”

“... refreshing: ‘A Cross swaying to and fro, a Christ with jerking limbs hanging onto it, a gaping John and a Madonna who in effect consists of a tangled clump of wool threads’. He does not wonder why such a completely unresolved drawing was preserved – unless it was by Michelangelo, in which case it would have been treasured as evidence of his tormented ...”