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“... The book gathered a buzz, went to America, won a prize from the Believer, then in 2008 Zadie Smith wrote about it in the New York Review of Books, in tandem with Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. Smith immediately got the point of the McCarthy project, its vehemence, its attack on the plushy poshlust of what she called ...”

“... There wasn’t anything inevitable about David Cameron’s rise. If Kenneth Clarke had stirred himself into running something like a campaign when competing for the leadership with Iain Duncan Smith and been ready to appear more tractable on Europe; if David Davis had moved decisively in the immediate aftermath of Michael Howard’s resignation or been a more fluent speaker; if Howard had offered Cameron the shadow chancellorship or George Osborne had not accepted it – if these or any number of other contingencies had been otherwise, Cameron might not have become leader ...”

“... Slessor’s good works on the Upper Niger still earn her an image on Scottish banknotes, while David Livingstone became the world’s best-known Scotsman. They did not save many souls. After 50 years’ work in India, the missions could show only 3359 converts. But their influence on empire was deep and paradoxical, at once the advance guard of colonialism ...”

“... galleries, alongside woodwork from the period. The curator who acquires it, Harold Clifford Smith, is an upper-middle-class Englishman straight out of central casting: the son of a wine merchant, educated at public school and Oxford, devoted to his old college, a regular contributor to Country Life. During the Great War, he serves in the intelligence ...”

“... to think – they bring about a new kind of social order: a ‘division of labour’, as Adam Smith called it, which fosters individual innovation and specialisation, and directs scarce resources where society needs them most. The problems affecting a mature capitalist system are obvious (trade cycles, unemployment, inflation and constant upheaval), but ...”

“... as prime minister. Some of this, of course, also relates to his struggles with Blair. When John Smith died in 1994, and Brown reluctantly decided to step aside to allow Blair to take the crown, it was partly because ‘the Murdoch press were all backing Tony … writing [him] up as the only moderniser. It was wholly unfair but predictable.’ Brown feared ...”

“... the invention of the breechloading metal cartridge, which made rifled weapons easy to load. Soon Smith and Wesson revolvers and Enfield rifles made rapid, accurate fire possible for the first time. If the argument against gun ownership is that guns are too dangerous to be entrusted to individuals who may be mad or bad, then 1850 would seem to be the date at ...”

“... her husband wrote a treatise, Oeconomiques (1745), that anticipated the calls of Turgot and Adam Smith for freer trade. The Dupins purchased some of their wine from the Baron de Montesquieu, though the two families fell out after Montesquieu published De l’esprit des lois in 1748 (Claude resented his attack on tax farming and Louise his tolerance for ...”

“... and find that we were ‘out of time’. But now? Well, ‘it’s here and I like it,’ as Will Smith says in his greeting card to the new year ‘Will 2K’. There isn’t much anxiety in this song, it’s time to celebrate. What exactly? The ‘Willennium’, he helpfully suggests, ‘the party of a lifetime ... resolution: get the money’. Future ...”

“... chronicle of three generations is the distillation of a much fuller chronicle kept by Harry Smith, the last boss, who quit in 1917. The trouble with Harry is that he is more interested in boilermaking than in social observation. On the run from the Bolsheviks and sharing a freezing hotel room, he notes with delight that the water in his bedside carafe ...”

“... need look no further than Web of Corruption, which tells the story of John Poulson and T. Dan Smith. Raymond Fitzwalter and David Taylor took eight years to research and write their analysis of the most far-reaching corruption trial of this century. The opening summary is startling. Of those prosecuted in connection ...”

“... to literary examples, Manning traces the provincialising of Calvinist attitudes in the writings of David Hume, Jonathan Edwards, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others. Far from a mechanical application of rigid doctrinal categories, Manning’s thoughtful critique shows how contradictory ...”

“... he chooses to reveal now about himself and his co-founders Matthew Symonds and Andreas Whittam-Smith he might have found recruits hard to come by. Comparing his book with my own memory of events is an odd experience: the office furniture is the same, even the faces are, so why does everything look different? Of the trio who set up the Sunday paper, Ian ...”

“... preoccupations and tastes. In her straining after the essence of things, she reminds one of David Malouf and of Bruce Chatwin (who married into her clan). I don’t mean that she copies them: she is too committed, too intense for that; an element of what an American reviewer called ‘self-administered therapy’ convinces one that she is too seriously ...”

“... 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 ...”