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“... A week before Christmas, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal and already serving life for three murders, was given another life sentence at the Palais de Justice in Paris for masterminding a bombing campaign that killed 11 people, according to a witness turning one of them into mincemeat. In order to finish its business on schedule the court sat until just before midnight on Thursday, 15 December: the accused, asked if he had anything to say before sentence was passed, nodded and took more than five hours to say it ...”

“... who in his long career seized more than 40 English ships. In 1940, the first shots in what Colin Smith calls ‘England’s last war against France’ were exchanged between the two navies. Before the armistice of 22 June, de Gaulle and Churchill had urged the French government to commit its large fleet and its 400,000-man colonial army in Africa ...”

“... first book, Writing Degree Zero, with Elements of Semiology, was translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith in 1967, and this volume is now reissued. The Fashion System appears in English for the first time, and Barthes’s solemnity here looks more and more like a deadpan act, or a feat of self-discipline, or perhaps both: Buster Keaton at the ...”

“... continued to undermine his health. Contaminated blood products, he said, had ‘ruined his life’.Colin Smith’s parents were told their son had HIV when he was two. It was 1984. The doctor ‘didn’t even take us into a room; he just told us in a corridor in front of other patients,’ Colin’s mother recalled. The ...”

“... Among the intellectual figures who have shaped the modern world Adam Smith stands out as someone who doesn’t frighten the laity, might be positively welcomed indeed by middle England. Should the neighbours catch a glimpse of the Wealth of Nations sitting on the bookshelf alongside Thatcher’s memoirs or the latest Delia Smith, there’s no risk of ostracism ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Imagine what it would be like to have worked for more than twenty years, as Clive Stafford Smith has, defending death-row inmates in the American South, only to find oneself in Guantánamo, what the military calls ‘the least worst place’, trying to win the trust of men who have not even been put on trial, who have not been accused of anything, but ...”

“... alike, while the New Right delights in a pedigree which reaches back to David Hume and Adam Smith. In the United States scholars have established the influence of Francis Hutcheson, Hume and Smith on the American Revolution and the making of the Constitution. This view has been widely disseminated – to the liberal ...”

“... for the Arts, Labour peer and otherwise big-haired all-rounder – lavished praise on Chris Smith. He ended with an anecdote about a meeting in the Cabinet Room at No. 10 the other week. The Prime Minister and Chris Smith had shepherded together a score or so of us from the arts world . . . A strange sound was ...”

“... a thousand wee anvils, xylophones clicking like hail. – How shall the gongs be tuned? asked the smith: Deep-voiced, in the tuning called ‘Brave Sea’ or shriller, in the pitch called ‘Burnt Tamarind’? – What is best for the Gamelan of Samara, the Love God? asked the other. – ‘A Field of Flowering Pandanus’, said the ...”

“... You’ve​ got to love Zadie Smith. When The Fraud arrived I did what no self-respecting reviewer should ever do. I flipped the book open and peeked at a random chapter. I know, I know. Never peek. It can spoil Christmas. But sometimes it’s just too tempting, and sometimes knowing what’s under the wrapping paper can make it even more fun to tear it off when the big day comes ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... state is no more than a highly inconvenient and thus insignificant truth. The Scottish jurist T.B. Smith took the Union at face value and refused to accept the subaltern status of Scots law within what had become by default a Greater English state. Why, Smith asked, did Section 70 of the Army Act of 1955 incorporate the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... party leader also felt constrained to observe the Home Rule commitments of his predecessor, John Smith. Of course, once devolution had been achieved, matters were simpler: as members of a UK-wide party, Labour politicians in the new Scottish Parliament were expected to follow the party line dictated by Blair from London, notwithstanding the supposed autonomy ...”