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“... the Scots invented Thatcherism, long before I was thought of.’ The Scot she meant was Adam Smith, a figure popularly identified as the founder of economics, an apostle of capitalism and honoured prophet of the new right. It was exasperating for Thatcher, and a pleasing irony for her opponents, that the nation of Adam ...”

“... won or lost. And don’t ever forget the villain who is secretly betraying them all. Martin Cruz Smith is an enthralling storyteller, but uses the authentic drama of Los Alamos only as the dynamic setting for a more earthy melodrama in which the historical characters are little more than cardboard cutouts. Stallion Gate could have been more than a good ...”

“... break with Rome. Only one did so outspokenly – and he was rewarded by a martyr’s death. John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, was executed in June 1535 for refusing (like Thomas More) to take the oath of succession. He was prepared to swear to the succession itself, which he believed that King and nobles were entitled to change, but was unwilling to ...”

“... There is,’ John Lord Campbell observed in his multi-volume, Mid-Victorian Lives of the Lord Chancellors, ‘no office in the history of any nation that has been filled with such a long succession of distinguished and interesting men as the office of Lord Chancellor.’ A roll-call which included such illustrious history-makers as Wolsey, More, Bacon and Clarendon lent some credence to Campbell’s hyperbole ...”

“... so great a claim to the gratitude of his country’. Less than two years later an ex-colleague, John Cam Hobhouse, commented: ‘I am surprised how, by mere fluency of speech and arrogance of manner, this really inferior man has contrived to lead a great party, and to connect his name imperishably with the most splendid triumphs of British ...”

“... emergence of political economy during the 18th century. This is a book about tragedy in which Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is at least as important as Aristotle’s Poetics. Smith’s account of society is, according to Halpern, ‘antitragic’. The operation of the market neutralises tragedy by alienating agency from ...”

“... writings on the 19th century state are rewarded with an entry of nine lines, the same as Lord John Russell who was merely in office at the time. This is three lines less than Bonar Law, dubbed by Asquith as the unknown prime minister, which proportionately must make Russell practically unheard-of. Such are the revenges of history, or at least of ...”

“... is a founding text of contemporary cookbook-writing, or Fergus Henderson, whose St John restaurants trained many of London’s newish wave of serious chefs – and to his and Gill’s generation of restaurant critics, the transgressive has become familiar. He’s not unaware of this, of course, and so, for the first time in his career, tries to ...”

“... breakthrough, the mind went back – as how could it not? – to the case of George Joseph Smith, a triple murderer of ninety years ago, all three of whose women victims were drowned in the bath but in three widely dispersed bathrooms, so that if they had been given in evidence in the ‘brides in the bath’ case of legend, the tubs would have needed ...”

“... we complacently suppose to be the agent conducting them. The format is, you might say, Delia Smith for eggheads: each experiment is topped, as though it were a kitchen recipe, by its ‘duration’, which can be anything from ‘instantaneous’, when you ‘rediscover a childhood scene that seemed larger’, up to the ‘few years’ it apparently takes ...”

“... on in their cabin, and the electric heater – so that it ‘would be warm on our return’. John Thayer, a young neighbour of the Eustis’s in Pennsylvania, shared a suite of rooms with his parents. After the impact, which he noticed hardly at all (‘if I had had a brimful glass of water in my hand not a drop would have been spilled’), he told them ...”

“... Light Infantry.* Now we have the high-minded and contentious letters of an ensign in the Guards, John Aitchison, who soldiered on after the war to become General Sir John Aitchison GCB, with a baton in his reach when he died at 87. Ensign Aitchison, while as eager as the next man for honour and renown, was one of those ...”

“... Never trust a man called Smith. Or rather, don’t trust him if he has a fake beard and is travelling with another man called Smith who also has a fake beard. This is one of the profound moral lessons which emerge from one of the most extraordinary incidents in 17th-century English history ...”

“... Mathew Gloag’s, the Financial Times, the Sunday Times and Fiji Film. In his preface, Robert Smith, Chairman of the Domesday Committee, observes: Every Briton is something of an historian. Britons have to be or they are not a hundred per cent British ... This country has been and will continue to be governed through its institutions. Through the ...”

“... the cosmic wires have been crossed and could the spiritualist have been talking to Martin Seymour-Smith? For this massive biography of Hardy – or ‘Tom’, as Seymour-Smith chummily calls him – has the vehemence of divine revelation and the fervour of personal mission. ‘I wrote Hardy,’ the author explains in a ...”