“... that had eluded Hume and Ferguson and the other Scots literati. He may have thought as he rode north to his home town, Kirkcaldy in Fife, in August 1746, that he had made a mistake. Let us look at Smith’s sentence a little more closely. In it there are two quantities, £500 and 800 men, which are brought into a sort of relation in the classic fashion of ...”

“... on Sartre (in 1959), and evokes Camus in Hiroshima Notes: ‘A plague that ravages a city in North Africa, for example, appears as an abnormal phenomenon; but the doctors and citizens who struggle against it rely on their normal everyday human traits.’ What Oë’s fiction takes from Existentialism is the privileging of the extreme situation, and the ...”

“... and who is prepared to stand up to the remaining superpower bully, the principal enemy of Islam. John Cooley is a veteran Middle East hand who has covered the region for the Christian Science Monitor and, more recently, for ABC television. His thesis is that the US – together with some of its closest allies, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan ...”

“... in the Public Works Department, while their sister married two civil servants in succession. John Lawrence, the future viceroy, was one of five brothers working simultaneously in India; John Nicholson, the hero of the siege of Delhi, was one of four brothers who died there. No family, however, sent as many members to ...”

“... nation; a few years ago this provoked the almost comically reactionary Liberal prime minister John Howard to inveigh against what he called the ‘black armband’ view of his country’s history (as opposed to the proud Gallipoli view), which launched the popular debate that became known in Australia as the ‘history wars’. The main argument was over ...”

“... missiles would make both merchant ships and surface warships dangerously vulnerable. (John Nott, for one, was persuaded.) The Americans assumed that the Russians were aiming for a great fleet battle – what other purpose could a large navy have? – but a battle fought largely by submarines and aircraft. Only later did it become clear that the ...”

“... as a setting for sculpture are the consequences of a single-minded pursuit by its main architect, John Russell Pope, of its underlying purpose, which was to provide a famous dealer in need of respectability, Lord Duveen, with a chance to display his munificence on a colossal scale. So the space seems designed to diminish any person or thing that enters ...”

“... relationship with Lawrence. The most important of these was the time in 1916 when Katherine and John Middleton Murry were persuaded to take a house next to the Lawrences in north Cornwall. The couples had known each other for some while; Katherine and Murry had been at the Lawrences’ wedding two years earlier. Among the ...”

“... phenomenon.’ One wonders how Bartlett explains that he writes a language which originated in the North German coastlands. For large periods of the early Middle Ages, the European map was more stable than is often realised. But at other times it was subject to hectic change, as new warlords elbowed out those whose martial juices were drying up. One early ...”

“... only five SDP candidates were elected – two of them in traditional Liberal seats in the far north of Scotland and two in Labour’s heartlands in South-East London. (The fifth was the party leader, in Plymouth.) Labour’s candidate in the Greenwich by-election which started this rot was Deirdre Wood. She had been a tremendous supporter of Ken ...”

“... probably would.’ Last year there was a series of more distressing revelations, about the ties of North American bioethics to the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries. Concerns about the influence of industry on academic medicine have been mounting steadily for years, fuelled in part by enormous industry profits – the pharmaceutical business has had ...”

“... in these programmes, ‘we had arrived big-time on the political scene.’ Adams and the SDLP’s John Hume together worked out the theological basis for what, after many drafts, was to become the British-Irish Downing Street Declaration of December 1993 – the document which paved the way for the IRA ceasefire of August 1994. The programmes give most of the ...”

“... economy. The legitimacy of the Energy Profits Levy, as with the levy on ‘excess profits’ from North Sea oil in the 1980s, seems partly dependent on the sheer size of the ‘windfall’ and partly on the direct link to consumers’ bills. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine may indirectly have boosted the profits of firms in various sectors of the economy, but ...”

“... McDonald has written (admiringly) of the ‘apparent fragility’ of the poems, and the critic John Lyon argued that ‘precariousness is a precondition of Longley’s art.’ Longley, who was all too familiar with protracted writer’s block, often spoke of precariousness in the sense that a poem might come but then again it might not. ‘I live from poem ...”

“... the crown; as a result partisanship carried different inflections north of the border. The experience of Ireland was more violent still and even further removed from the English template. Civil war on the magnitude Ireland witnessed between 1689 and 1691 could not be squeezed into a pint-pot labelled ...”