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“... in a different position. How they chose a profession, or how their parents chose one for them, as Rory Muir demonstrates, determined to a substantial degree the quality and even the length of their life. Barring a couple of unlikely ways out, such as marrying a rich heiress (rare because rich heiresses tended to marry men at least as rich as they were), or ...”

“... Why would two such energetic Enlightenment scholars from Edinburgh University – who knew Adam Smith and William Robertson – choose on their return from the East to establish their intellectual life in London, rather than the Athens of the North? And why – when Dr Johnson’s contemporary portrait of Scotland is neurotic about the loss of authenticity ...”

“... been quoted again and again since 11 September, including by George Bush, Tony Blair, Iain Duncan-Smith and an endless string of journalists: ‘Whoever kills a soul is like one who has killed the whole of Mankind.’ This sentence is at the heart of the Politically Correct campaign to ensure that the war fever against Islamic terrorists doesn’t lead to an ...”

“... functioning of the market order. During his tenure as work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith sought to redefine poverty in terms of behaviour, emphasising drugs, alcohol, worklessness, family stability and parenting skills, an approach which conveniently sidestepped the distributional consequences of economic policy and wage levels just as the ...”

“... which can only be alleviated one bad actor at a time. In tone​ , if not in argument, Stephen Smith’s Scramble for Europe belongs to the crisis literature that began to appear in 2015 after Merkel’s decision to allow more refugees into Germany than EU burden-sharing rules required. The notion of a ‘European refugee crisis’ had already coalesced in ...”

“... addicted to thirty-mile walks in his oldest tweeds, he might have been more at home with Rory Stewart, but there’s possibly a bit of Buchan’s vision in the Black Stone of Brexit, and a bit of Hannay in Johnson’s swagger. It can’t only be down to Hitchcock that The Thirty-Nine Steps has never been out of print, or that most bookshops still ...”

“... March. This last week I finish reading Common Ground by Rob Cowen and The Places In Between by Rory Stewart, both books about wildernesses, Stewart’s in Afghanistan, Cowen’s in almost comical contrast in and around Harrogate. As he tells the story Stewart seems in regular peril of his life, Cowen less so as he just makes expeditions from his suburban ...”

“... of philosophy, sociology, economics and politics based on the grand tradition of Machiavelli, Smith, Constant, Ricardo, Hegel, Marx, de Tocqueville, Weber and so on. My department had a subsection called Political Theory, which was usually taught by a European scholar and whose range extended from Plato to Marx, but included no Americans. The second ...”

“... The Vegetarian and Human Acts have won startling numbers of readers in the translations by Deborah Smith, in which the underspecification, repetition and starkness of Korean have been, by Smith’s own account and with Han’s full approval, enhanced by ‘occasional interpolations’ after she listened ‘more carefully to ...”

“... belonging to Henrietta Roberts (later Dombey), the daughter of Michael Roberts and Janet Adam Smith. What occasioned Rupert’s interest was his having been to look at a very grand house for his magazine (World of Interiors), the expensive decoration of which included several Ben Nicholsons. This reminded me that over the fireplace in the very rundown ...”

“... afternoon spent in the stagnant pool of daytime TV, I came across the renowned impressionist Rory Bremner (known for his ‘sharp satire and unforgiving political commentary’) giving himself over to a satirical – sorry, sartorial – makeover, in a Brighton boutique which specialises in everything Mod. The odd thing about this (OK, one of the odd ...”

“... tawny port stood on the bar, and I was inspecting it when MacGregor arrived with Mr and Mrs Smith. That’s what he’d been calling them in his emails to me. Craig Wright, 45 years old, wearing a white shirt under a black jacket, a pair of blue chinos, a belt with a large Armani buckle and very green socks, wasn’t the kind of guy who seems ...”