“... How many of our highbrows, for example, the ones who get the lead reviews, write as well as, say, Michael Dibdin, author of the haunting Ratking? P.D. James’s new novel seems to return us straight to Auden’s theology. It is set in rural East Anglia, and takes its title from the Anglican prayer book: ‘We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost ...”

“... his local CB radio club, Holmes died after a second massive heart attack.The local Labour MP, Llew Smith, who knew Holmes, secured a late-night Commons debate on the All Work Test. He said that Holmes had endured ‘a degrading experience, conducted in an uncaring manner’, which had led to his death. ‘Can the honourable gentleman tell me of a medical ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... agency responsible for his prosecution the ‘department of injustice’? Or when he called Jack Smith, the special prosecutor overseeing the case, ‘deranged’ and referred to his staff as ‘thugs’? Or when he suggested that General Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a potential witness, had committed an act of treason ...”

“... If the enemy of my enemy is my friend, it follows that the enemy of Michael Howard is my hero. So awful was Howard’s long reign at the Home Office that many liberals sought democratic relief from the most blatantly undemocratic section of the establishment: the judiciary. It was the strange sound of Law Lords denouncing Howard’s preposterous insistence that ‘prison works’ and the widespread jubilation at his many snubbings in the courts that led to liberal hosannas for the judges ...”

“... its discourses. The subject, in Auden’s plays, is constructed out of these delusive discourses. Michael Ransom in F6 had acknowledged somewhat abstractly that he, too, was implicated in ‘the web of guilt that prisons every upright person’, that like all the others he is ‘swept and driven by the possessive incompetent fury and the disbelief’. But he ...”

“... by producing what it’s best at producing, and exporting that abroad. The writings of Adam Smith and David Ricardo are so influential in the trade world that most experts refuse even to discuss the merits of this basic laissez-faire assumption. The US, born out of a tax revolt in the same year that The Wealth of Nations was published, has long accepted ...”

“... a benighted feudal aristocracy, and the incentives this created for agrarian improvement. Adam Smith, in particular, foresaw a similar pathway for Ireland: ‘By an union with Great Britain the greater part of the people of all ranks in Ireland would gain an equally compleat deliverance from a much more oppressive aristocracy’ founded on ‘religious and ...”

“... prize, the alleged kingpin of Tulia’s drug trade. Another of those arrested was Donnie Smith. Charismatic, a former star athlete, he had graduated from high school against the odds. But he was soon getting into fights and taking drugs. A failed marriage and a series of dead-end jobs didn’t help. He was known to be on crack, and to have sold small ...”

“... Just as some faces are a gift to the photographer (Artaud, Patti Smith), so certain lives are a gift to the biographer. These are, broadly, of two types: the hard and gemlike, abbreviated, compressed, intense; and the lengthy, implausible, exfoliated, whiskery, picaresque. Vehement or even violent emotion is good, overt drama, prominent contacts or associations, sudden changes of orientation, movement through different societies and settings ...”

“... of Nabokov mocking cheap deliveries of novelistic information: ‘you recall Brown, don’t you, Smith?’ There must be something in both views, but the really interesting feature of the odder adverbs is not how little they say but how they manage to say nothing at all, as if they were being ostentatiously wiped from a blackboard. When Gilbert Osmond cries ...”

“... in 1984, is another word for consenting to one’s own oppression.’ But when Winston Smith falls asleep murmuring ‘sanity is not statistical,’ as Phillips reminds us he does, he has another sanity in mind. ‘It is an important implication of 1984,’ Phillips writes, ‘that sanity and its definitions would not be so manipulable if they ...”

“... but the daily rite of time and precision is still enacted. This nugget of information from Michael Young and Tom Schuller’s Life after Work* is both moving and symbolic. Greenwich was the chosen area of their enquiry into what happens to us after we stop clocking in. As one with a year or so to go, I found their survey gripping. Time, which you obey ...”

“... the commitment to a devolved parliament in Edinburgh from his predecessor as leader, John Smith, and Donald Dewar, who would become first minister in Holyrood in 1999. Although there wasn’t the same investment in devolution in the Welsh Labour Party, the MP for Caerphilly, Ron Davies, managed to persuade Blair that proposals for a Welsh Assembly ...”

“... on Huawei’s involvement in Britain’s 5G network, and the bombardiers of Brexit – Iain Duncan Smith, David Davis, Liam Fox et al – are furious too. The industry points out that Huawei kit has already been installed in dozens of cities across the UK and to a more sophisticated standard than the US can currently provide. Ripping it all out would cost ...”