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“... member of his family kiss another. His dying father ‘put his arm around my sister’s neck and drew her down and kissed her’. The boy was 11. That electrifying actual kiss is coupled in the life of Twain with another, imaginary kiss which Tom Sawyer placed on the sleeping lips of his Aunt Polly while he was creeping about the house at night. The family ...”

“... a Florida swamp, where they spent the war fighting malaria, mosquitoes and snakes.) Bryan finally drew the line at swallowing the Philippines. This, he said, was imperialism pure and simple. The island’s natives had rejected the uplifting Anglo-Saxon mission. They rebelled, demanded liberty from their benefactors, and mired America’s imperial illusions in ...”

“... True satiation. It seems so simple. Probably as simple as infinity and the universe.Unlike Patti Smith, her fellow New York rocker and ancient rival, Harry doesn’t do hallucinatory chats with dead lovers and a motel sign (‘Thank you, Dream Motel, I said … It’s the Dream Inn! the sign exclaimed’), or stud her text with dingy photos of chairs and ...”

“... for this view, in Columella’s book on agriculture or the younger Pliny’s letters. But Alberti drew on a wider range of classical sources. Christine Smith has argued that Lucretius, whom Petrarch never read, helped inspire Alberti’s dismay at the lack of giants in his world. In his odd-sounding reference to the ...”

“... a Poundian spirit, as the ‘Putrescent idol of retail’. As Coleridge put it in a passage Hill drew on for the epigraph to ‘An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England’, there is what we once had, ‘spiritual platonic old England’, represented by Sidney, Shakespeare, Wordsworth and their kind, and then there is what we now ...”

“... Descriptions​ of Richard Titmuss often drew on the language of otherworldliness. He was ‘the high priest of the welfare state’ according to an assessment quoted in the ODNB. His entry there considers, though judiciously rejects, his frequent characterisation as a ‘saint’; understandably, it doesn’t cite his LSE colleague Michael Oakeshott’s description of him as ‘a snake in saint’s clothing ...”

“... of the age’. Thomas Chalmers features as the ‘spiritual guide’ of the Liberal Tories. Adam Smith, of course, is ‘central’. Mechanics institutes open first in Glasgow, and then in London. Phrenology infiltrates England ‘via Scotland’. The Edinburgh Review, founded in 1802 by a group of Scottish Whigs, together with the Quarterly Review published ...”

“... shillings and sixpence. Each purchaser from Browning’s stall – or from that of his publishers, Smith, Elder – was therefore paying thirty shillings, or 360 pence, i.e. 45 times the price of the original. Like a canny Victorian merchant, Browning picked up his raw material cheap abroad, manufactured it into fancy goods, and sold it at a premium in his ...”

“... Protestant ideas had established only a superficial hold in England, the case goes, Cardinal Pole drew back from the strenuous evangelisation that was so urgently needed, and refused help from the Jesuits because he ‘simply did not want men with the fire of the Counter-Reformation in their bellies’. Over the last twenty years, this negative consensus has ...”

“... he sought to recover a lost critical tradition that reached back beyond Marx to Adam Smith. Some of the most enthusiastic early readers of The Wealth of Nations, he noted, were radicals who saw the work as a powerful indictment of aristocratic privilege. It was only after the French Revolution that the division between laissez-faire and socialism ...”

“... of the planet, some may involve feedback that helps life itself to continue,’ Peter Godfrey-Smith wrote in the LRB of 19 February 2015. ‘If they come about, they do so as fortuitous by-products of the evolution of particular living things.’ Andrew Watson, the co-creator of Daisyworld, later distanced himself from Lovelock’s insistence on ...”

“... economics (Hayek), law (Schmitt), philosophy (Strauss) and history (Oakeshott) – but politics drew their concerns into a common field. There, they were divided by marked contrasts of character and outlook, and by the respective situations they confronted. The interweaving of themes and outcomes, across such differences, is all the more arresting. The ...”

“... a certain point he seems never to have spoken or responded to language again), he drew constantly, producing large, hypnotic images on brown paper bags or donated rolls of examining-table paper of the type you see in doctors’ surgeries. His characteristic subjects include arid Mexican landscapes and hills (often with train tunnels and trains ...”

“... with whom you want to spend prolonged periods of time. Reviewing Noakes’s biography, Stevie Smith observed that ‘another thing that bit upon poor Lear’s nerves when they were ageing – and bites upon ours as we read of them – are those endless travels.’ He was infuriating to himself and to others, an interminably perplexed celebrant of what he ...”

“... factual claims. The god Yahweh promised the land of Canaan to Abraham and his descendants; Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon from golden plates received from the angel Moroni; Jesus of Nazareth is seated at the right hand of the Father, and will return to judge the living and the dead. Religion, whatever else it involves, has an irreducible core of ...”