“... sciences do better? Economists were busy constructing universal theories of homo economicus. Adam Smith, in his famous formulation, told us that all humans seek to ‘truck, barter and trade’. The whole object of The Wealth of Nations was to persuade us (and British governments) that everyone should cease interfering with this natural and universal ...”

“... senza foco alcuno artista l’ oro Al sommo grado suo raffina e rende. (‘Only with fire can the smith shape iron’ / Form his conception into fine, dear work; / Neither, without fire, can any artist / Refine and bring gold to its highest state.’) The opening lines, with their internal rhymes, alliteration and enjambment suggest both the strenuous beating ...”

“... of talents: Lucille Ball, Eddie Cantor, Kirk Douglas, Melvyn Douglas, Deanna Durbin, Melvyn Frank, Daniel Fuchs, Henry Fonda, John Garfield, Ava Gardner, Judy Garland, Henry Hathaway, Van Heflin, Fritz Lang, Burt Lancaster, Audie Murphy, Burgess Meredith, Groucho Marx, Vincente Minnelli, Gregory Peck, Vincent Price, Robert Ryan, Edward G. Robinson, Donna ...”

“... more often than not, dull. Sir Mortimer Wheeler probably started the rot and then there was Glyn Daniel and his bow ties and today it’s Tony Robinson capering about professing huge excitement because of the uncovering of the (entirely predictable) foundations of a Benedictine priory at Coventry. His enthusiasm is anything but infectious and almost ...”

“... comment on Spanish activity in the Falklands from l774 to 1811. In 1809 Admiral Sir William Sidney Smith reported that Viceroy Liniers had deported the leaders of the Buenos Aires cabildo, or town council, to ‘the Maloinas or Falkland Islands’. In the same year he assured Liniers that ‘Great Britain would aim at neither sovereignty nor territorial ...”

“... afterlife because of our fear of death and our longing for justice; on this, a believer like Adam Smith (in The Theory of Moral Sentiments) and a non-believer like Freud (in The Future of an Illusion) pretty much agree. But Casey makes the nice point that it would make little sense to argue that Egyptians longed for eternal life because they feared ...”

“... personal life, too, was in crisis. His marriage had fallen apart, and the novelist William Gardner Smith ran away with his mistress. He became convinced – with good reason – that the black expatriate journalist Richard Gibson was spying on him for the CIA. In his last year Wright slept with a revolver beside his bed. When friends made light of his ...”

“... at Ellingham Hall Assange was fast asleep. He’d been living there, at the house of Vaughan Smith, one of his sureties and founder of the Frontline Club, since his arrest on Swedish rape allegations. He was effectively under house arrest and wearing an electronic tag on his leg. He would sign in at Beccles police station every afternoon, proving he ...”

“... reasonable state socialism’.In Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (1998), Daniel Rodgers showed that many Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries returned from stays in Germany with ideas that would inform the New Deal. Little, however, is still known about the global history of this German-devised state – what W.E.B. Du ...”

“... Marxism, now editor-at-large for Spiked and a contributor to the Times on topics such as Delia Smith, stopping smoking, and the holiday cottage in Broadstairs he and his wife bought to let for £150,000 in 2006. There’s also the kittenish, aubergine-haired Tiffany Jenkins, whose research, she says, concerns ‘contested authority in the cultural sector ...”

“... which seems to have provided the other side of Osmond’s ancestry, the character of Grandcourt in Daniel Deronda. Grandcourt is a brilliant social creation, with interesting psychological depths, but without the resonance that makes the Duke almost a simplified ‘mask’ – a royal mask speaking of the ambiguities of the Palace of Art. ‘My Last ...”

“... cultural milieu. There was Clive, Fred Halliday, later Sheila Rowbotham got involved, and Roger Smith, script editor at the BBC. The French May erupted as we were about to launch the first issue, which had come out looking slightly miserabilist and unimaginative. It was generally felt that the cover was awful. We voted to pulp it and D.A.N. Jones, later of ...”

“... the movement not only read Marx with the ease and lack of distance that we associate with reading Smith or Mill (studying any classic in one’s own language is a very different experience from scrutinising celebrated texts from another); they were also formed by the legacy of Benjamin, the presence of Horkheimer and Adorno, messages from Marcuse, the debut ...”

“... The next morning, Friday, 30 June, two weeks after the fire, was Paget-Brown’s last in office. Daniel Moylan, a Conservative councillor, called him at home at 7.45 a.m. ‘I will be calling publicly for you to go,’ Moylan said, ‘for trying to hold a meeting in private.’ Paget-Brown listened politely before saying he’d been put in an impossible ...”