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“... is to blame?’ The crime itself is oddly anachronistic. It’s more than twenty years since David Foster Wallace placed a lethally entertaining video cartridge at the centre of Infinite Jest. Who records a videotape these days? Who sends out dozens of copies of that tape by mail? When the first tape surfaces, at a local news station in Chicago, the ...”

“... founding fathers anyway. (Both things are more or less right.) It is probably because John Smith, who led the party from July 1992 until his death in 1994, would not be prematurely enrolled in New Labour that the depiction of him here is so bleak. The man who might have led Labour to victory, thus bypassing the possibility of a Blair leadership, is not ...”

“... below, he chats to his fellow journalists: ‘the pug-nosed, the pug-eared Morgan’, Davidson-Smith (‘overcoated’, ‘deerstalker-hatted’) and Freddie Fredericks, Frank Attercliffe’s aging and alcoholic mentor, and co-author with him of Pindar’s Weekend Round-up, a sports column on the Northern Post. After the match, in the Buckingham ...”

“... should consider the sentence of hard labour that is the summer/autumn literary festival circuit. David Starkey – to take an almost random example – is talking about his bestselling Life of Elizabeth I not only at the Rye Festival this month (his session’s already sold out, I’m afraid), but at the Ilkley Literature Festival on 7 October, the ...”

“... by a public vote, as an allegedly democratic gesture against the elitism of literary prizes. Zadie Smith won in the New Talent category; Jamie Oliver was best for Home and Leisure and Simon Schama for General Knowledge; J.K. Rowling wrote the best children’s book and Maeve Binchy’s Scarlet Feather won the Fiction Award. These results, of course, could have ...”

“... influence at an early age, and later subjected to university in large, impersonal classes. So Adam Smith, a mother’s boy all his life, can be seen as free from parental domination because he was a posthumous child. Camic offers various references to the Scottish concept of patriarchy, but the belief that parental domination over thought and behaviour can ...”

“... by Sir Joseph Banks, who later bequeathed it to the British Museum (in fact, it was bought by J.E. Smith and subsequently purchased from him by the Linnean Society, in whose loving care it has remained ever since). Instead of spending his energies on other, much less relevant aspects of science, he would have done far better to have donned those country shoes ...”

“... novelist to represent the historical process, the first portrayer of society in terms that Adam Smith might and Karl Marx did approve. David Brown makes the academic case admirably. He begins by modestly disclaiming originality: he is developing insights put forward by others in recent years, and only applying them more ...”

“... one of the reasons why they had failed. But, thanks to the willingness of the publisher, George Smith, to lose £70,000 on an outlay of £100,000, the DNB, ‘in accord with the self-reliant temperament of the British race’, was ‘the outcome of private enterprise and the handiwork of private citizens’. Thus conceived and completed, embodying ‘the ...”

“... a ready-made cartoon: it needed no comment, only somebody to point, and found its man in William Smith, MP for Norwich and an early friend of the Lake poets. Smith pulled from one pocket a copy of the Quarterly, and from the other a copy of Wat Tyler, and asked if the inference was not that the author of the one must ...”

“... to this nation’.) Opposition to multiculturalism became a key part of the Ukip platform, and of David Cameron’s attempt to protect his government’s right flank from Nigel Farage.Punitive prison sentences (often four or five years long) were handed out to the young British-Asian men charged with rioting in Bradford, many of whom had been taken by their ...”

“... Kinnock out of the script for good. He is a young man – at 45, four years younger even than David Owen and David Steel; and the electoral college system, with its 40 per cent trade-union weighting, makes him reasonably invulnerable to coups from left or right. As long as he wants to go on leading the Labour Party ...”

“... forms of preparation for life, it tended to train its pupils for the wrong battles. David Newsome pointed out long ago that the very success of the games cult risked failing to transform boys into men at all. Rugby’s capacity to equip its charges for the challenges of industrialised warfare, emergent democracy and technological revolution was ...”

“... kind of twinkling naughtiness can occasionally be hard work. (‘Betty Boop in a pas de deux with David Sedaris,’ Dwight Garner called Priestdaddy in the New York Times.) But it’s a mistake to take Lockwood’s cuteness at face value. The rites and symbols she holds up for ridicule – the solemn processions, the incense, the swords, feathers, tufts and ...”

“... things​ in the relations between authors and publishers never change. Dear Mr Murray, edited by David McClay (John Murray, £16.99), a collection of letters written to six generations of the Murray family, is full of familiar complaints. Jane Austen was ‘very much disappointed … by the delays of the printers’. Maria Rundell, author of A New System of ...”