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“... One of the​ more mournful consequences of the economic crisis is the boom in the business of illness. This is in one sense a figure of speech. The economies of the West are evidently unwell: since 1973, they have been obsessed with the etiology of economic impairment, the electroencephalograms of unemployment and inflation. But it is also literally true ...”

“... Times are dire for economists in America. The country is preoccupied with its economic misfortunes. Yet the most esteemed theorist of economic recovery seems to be the early 19th-century French populariser of Adam Smith known to Marx as ‘the inane Jean-Baptiste Say … [who] refutes himself again’. The most successful recent guide to the economy – a work called Wealth and Poverty, described by the Republican Director of the Office of Management and Budget as ‘Promethean in its intellectual power and insight’ – explains (with the required obeisance to Say) that slow economic growth is to be understood in terms of faith, the modesty of female sexuality and the ‘dominance of single and separated men in poor communities ...”

“... The city of Hangchow, in the 13th century, was transfixed by food. Its restaurants went in and out of fashion, and were commemorated in elaborate and scholarly guidebooks. There were restaurants specialising in regional food, fish restaurants, fast-food bars, restaurants which served iced food or vegetarian dishes. Its markets were ‘innumerable’, according to Marco Polo, selling game, varieties of apricot, early aubergines, live baby fish carried inland in baskets ...”

“... for subsistence, but to the ‘delicacy’, or taste, which raised him above the brute creation. Emma Rothschild warns us that the shadow of Right-Left divisions and the fear of revolution have haunted understanding of Smith between his death in 1790, during the early stages of the French Revolution, and the collapse of Communism in 1989-91. Only now ...”

“... Henry Raeburn’s ‘John Johnstone, Betty Johnstone and Miss Wedderburn’ (c.1790-95). Emma Rothschild has a written a strange, immensely thoughtful book which at first glance ought to complement Devine’s work. But it does nothing of the sort, attending instead to the history of sensibilities rather than of nations. It is based on the lives ...”

“... nuclear disarmament which, he hopes, would be infectious. In ‘The American Arms Boom’ Emma Rothschild describes, and castigates, the growing expenditure on arms research, development and production, and its motivation. Elsewhere, Mary Kaldor discusses the conversion problems which would arise as a result of substantial disarmament. Ken ...”

“... favourite injunctions from Flaubert was to guard against ‘la rage de vouloir conclure’. Emma Rothschild and Amartya Sen, in a short note here on his economic heterodoxies, are among the few to heed it. Some, being American, have praised his commitment to liberty, but he rarely and then almost always with the irony of a capital letter wrote ...”

“... But de Pougy wouldn’t give up her male clients, who included the Prince of Wales and Maurice de Rothschild. ‘I still need 800,000 francs before I can stop,’ she wrote. ‘Then I shall cable you: “Come take me.”’Albert Barney, Natalie’s alcoholic and violent father, whose fortune came from the family business manufacturing railway cars, was ...”

“... lists in her seven pages of acknowledgments, she knows all (two full pages) the right people (Lord Rothschild, Henry Kissinger, Bruce Oldfield, Emma Soames), quantities (three paragraphs) of the right researchers, and even the right London hotel owner, who made ‘a room available every time I hit town’ for ‘a demanding ...”

“... Day; that the only person who could help Rosa while she was dying was their other schoolfriend Emma, ‘who has inherited from her own mother the gift of healing hands’; that Emma’s mother wears lipstick called Un-shy Violet and ‘is named Kiloran after a bay on the island of Colonsay’; that the ‘laird who gets ...”