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“... profundity. In more sustained fashion, Galbraith also demolishes what I would call the ‘Adam Smith syndrome’. The symptoms of this especially Anglo-Saxon malady are: 1. the belief that all non-ceremonial state action is at least wasteful and often counterproductive, except to provide for the national defence on a most lavish scale; 2. the fervent ...”

“... and political naivety. These chapters lead to their closing theme, ‘Judgment’, which includes lively tussles with the so-called political realists and with that ‘scepticism about moral judgment ... which arises from popular and philosophical ideas of relativism and subjectivism’. Endlessly open to counter-argument, their purpose is not to prescribe ...”

“... and matching many different taste sensations. In other words, it is not like a novel by Penelope Lively. It will not set you up; nor will it tell you how to live. That is not what it is for. The mother-type of these feast-like compilations is The Arabian Nights Entertainment – note the word ‘entertainment’. That shambolic anthology of literary ...”

“... undemanding, though very important just the same for reasons of prestige. Grete comes across as a lively, intelligent, loyal, delightful child. Even her snobbery, her passionately-held beliefs about what constitutes ‘common’ behaviour, and her priggishness, are endearing. What upset a lot of contemporary readers of the Diary is that she thinks such a lot ...”

“... in. Though an ecclesiastical historian and an Anglican canon, its author treats his anything but lively subject in a lively fashion that helps to dispel its glooms. ‘The stolid battalions of the theologians and the irresponsible cavalry of hell-fire preachers and menacing apologists who skirmished on their flanks’, and ...”

“... in Paris. The structural analysis of myth remains a powerfully seductive methodology, and in the lively community of Brazilian anthropology Lévi-Strauss is revered as an interpreter of traditional ways of thought. Yet it now appears that he made too much of the uniqueness of remote tropical societies, and misrepresented them as cultural dodos which could ...”

“... was accumulated as much by the successful outcomes to the risks he took as by his hard work and lively intuition’ – was a man who could resist his ‘inherited background’; and who retired in 1898 at the age of 51 ‘stupendously rich’. (‘It would be idle to speculate on how much money he was worth.’) This, as Wittgenstein described it in On ...”

“... you choose, to have it. Money may be Frozen Desire, but when it thaws out Desire may emerge less lively than one had hoped. James Buchan would agree that it isn’t much use talking to economists about these money mysteries, for they will all tell you different things, with little in common except their unintelligibility. He himself clearly does know a lot ...”

“... patterns. This makeover should come as no surprise. Referring to his native South Africa, Adam Kuper reminds us that ‘protecting’ cultural identities was also an official strategy under apartheid. Today, with brawny arrogance again forcing its way in among the vulnerable minorities sheltering under culture’s umbrella, the example is harder to ...”

“... to be a free-rider and thus together destroy a public good which we each hoped to get for free. As Adam Ferguson remarked long ago, ‘history is the result of human action, not of human design.’ This theme has lately inspired a vast enthusiasm for applying the economists’ theory of Rational Choice to social life at large. Define a ‘rational agent’ as ...”

“... All cultivated connections with financial and political power, and shared those connections in lively letters which circulated round the family and round much of the known world. It was the accidental discovery of one cache of those letters that set Rothschild off down the track to this book. George Romney’s portrait of George Johnstone’s ...”

“... they occur and to say why they matter. There is a moving case of translation loss in the book Adam Thirlwell has edited, Multiples, but it involves history as much as literature, and the book is also full of gains, and even fuller of instances where we can’t draw up a balance sheet of any kind, and are driven to quite different modes of comparison. The ...”

“... why I found the result unpersuasive. Now here’s a biography of Pontius Pilate, a long, sometimes lively and sometimes learned piece of work, that is equally unconvincing. Pilate was of course a historical figure, represented not only in the gospels but in the writings of a contemporary, the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo Judaeus, and, more ...”

“... of his poetic activity became clear only after his death: two blazing unfinished verse dramas, Adam and Eve and Dipsychus and the Spirit; a fantastically spiky novel in verse, Amours de Voyage (in his lifetime published only in America); a Chaucerian collection of verse tales told by the passengers on a transatlantic steamer, Mari Magno; and a welter of ...”

“... many make it from the bottom to the top quartile. Debate between these two camps has always been lively, as have disputes, among advocates of class analysis, about how best to construct a class scheme.These disputes took on a new significance in 2005 when a report on income mobility, co-authored by Machin, made the news. Not only was the UK alongside the US ...”