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“... apparently split themselves in two and do both. Just ten minutes ago I heard Alexander McCall Smith, a writer of feel-good detective novels, tell an interviewer how his work comes to him through his ‘unconscious’: plots, characters, everything bubbles up from the murky depths and tells him its story. He just types it out. Now this I envy. My ...”

“... from stylistic analysis. There is also the method of ‘too close reading’ wittily practised by David Miller, especially in his book Hidden Hitchcock (2016).Wolfson’s work is not unrelated to this last example – both writers are concerned with seeing apparitions and being glad to see them – but she tends to think that patient, uncensored curiosity ...”

“... writer Philip Coggan, and in Debt: The First 5000 Years by the anthropologist and activist David Graeber, which situates the same stretch of modern history within the vast tidal shifts, across five millennia of Eurasian history, between monetary regimes founded on precious metals and those based on ‘virtual credit money’. In August 1971, Nixon ...”

“... or at least its dedicated mourner. He has written a polemic against John Major’s Government and David Owen, the EU mediator in the remains of Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1995, for their connivance in the ferocious dismantling of Bosnia-Herzegovina. He is keen on Major’s New Labour successors, and confident that Tony Blair’s support for the Milosevic ...”

“... Life of an Ordinary Man, the posthumous memoir pieced together by the publisher and journalist David Rosenthal. His source material was a series of interviews Newman recorded with the screenwriter Stewart Stern between 1986 and 1991, along with ‘oral histories’ of Newman by his contemporaries. In her foreword, Newman’s daughter Melissa says he wanted ...”

“... come away. 22 February. Switch on Newsnight to find some bright spark from, guess where, the Adam Smith Institute, proposing the privatisation of public libraries. His name is Eamonn Butler and it’s to be hoped he’s no relation of the 1944 Education Act Butler. Smirking and pleased with himself as they generally are from that stable, he’s pitted against ...”

“... still a gleam in the inventor’s eye, and even before us there had been other brothers – the Smith Brothers; the Brothers Karamazov; Dan Brothers, an outfielder with Detroit. It is the letter of the shyster lawyer he had always half wanted to be, but the joke was lost on the Warner Brothers legal department, who asked for an explanation of the ...”

“... a play might be unique seemed to them very strange indeed. 27 June, Chichester. Talking to Maggie Smith about the number of grey heads in our audience, I compare them with a field of dandelion clocks. She says that she’s read or been told that the Warwickshire folk name for these was ‘chimney-sweeps’ so that Shakespeare’s ‘Golden lads and girls all ...”

“... production schedule? But the BBC was quick to announce the younger, extraordinarily attractive David Tennant as his successor, with a glow, almost, of parental pride. Fine-boned and wriggly, somehow, like a silky dog, Tennant has a helpless quality, which lends him great adorability. ‘My girlfriend is besotted,’ leicesterbloke writes on the digitalspy ...”

“... the greatest ideas.’ Rejecting one of them, a pitch for a Marvel project constructed around David Schwimmer from Friends, the executives reached a consensus that ‘David Schwimmer had no charisma and was a little bit derided.’ Then they high-fived one another over Lee’s head.Professional humiliations didn’t ...”

“... not quite know what to do with them. The illustration on the front cover is by a Scottish artist, David Wilkie. John Rennie makes an appearance as one of ‘the most iconic figures of the age’. Thomas Chalmers features as the ‘spiritual guide’ of the Liberal Tories. Adam Smith, of course, is ‘central’. Mechanics ...”

“... been a part of his work; Outcast London began with a survey of British economic thought from David Ricardo to William Stanley Jevons. Now, Stedman Jones’s commitment to the constitutive power of language propelled him down a path that eventually led to a tamed version of social democracy. In An End to Poverty (2004), he sought to recover a lost ...”

“... of the theatrical potential of language. Even personal letters – like this to his friend William Smith – turn into imaginative performance: Infallible Doctor,   Let this apologize for long silence. – Your request would have been long since granted, but I know not what it is best to compose: a Hindica-syllabum carmen ...”

“... restrictions, left-of-centre figures such as Cook, John Prescott, Margaret Beckett and Chris Smith have been allowed to surround themselves with like-minded ministers. The man who has replaced the Blairite factotum Stephen Byers, for example, in charge of minimum wage and trade-union rights, is Ian McCartney – a Prescott protégé who declared not long ...”

“... that obedience to natural law means ‘that every man shall pursue his own happiness’ (echo of David Hume and foretaste of Bentham himself?). The puzzle is rather, as Ross Harrison suggests in his discussion of Bentham’s thought as a whole – a considerable achievement – why Bentham did not enlist natural law as an ally of utility: they had much in ...”