Search Results

“... anyone want to be described as an old adult?), but it is commercially and creatively lively, and it would be no insult to The Buried Giant to admit it into that category. It’s certainly not too bleak, bleakness no longer being a disqualification from excellence and success in the field, if it ever was (I’m thinking of Sally Gardner’s 2013 ...”

“... Hume’s practical stance in politics did not differ in essentials from that of Burke or Adam Smith, although the situations and preoccupations of each of the three made for slightly different emphases. A significant point is that Hume died in 1776, and so before the enlightened talk of the Encyclopédistes had turned to blood. The less noticeable ...”

“... bookish, for I remember browsing on the shelves of his college room and picking up a copy of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, a set book for our History prelims, only to find in it the daunting inscription: ‘To Raphael on his eighth birthday.’ Since those days, Samuel has earned a distinctive place in the annals of British historiography as a ...”

“... areas, at campsites where they were always in the company of others just like them, having lively conversations with their neighbours surrounded by socks drying on tent cords.’ The Oder looked big to the narrator as a child, but it had its place in the hierarchy of rivers, ‘a kind of country viscountess at the court of the Amazon queen’. The ...”

“... of ‘entrepreneurial’ needs closer attention). Spawned by Scutari and Sebastopol out of Adam Smith, the great watchwords of private enterprise – competition, performance and testing – rode out to do battle with bureaucracy, nepotism and sloth. A.H. Layard had ‘often heard it said’, he told the Commons, ‘why does not the Government allow ...”

“... in a woman’s voice: the siren incarnate against whom you have to plug your ears or else, like Adam, you will feel the plunge as you fall. It is odd how wholeheartedly women have given themselves to playing this part – to believing it, too. Or perhaps it’s not all that odd: the femme fatale offers more opportunities than several of the other ...”

“... the evening cloud, how much more all the particulars of daily economy; for he had touched with his lively curiosity every trivial fact and circumstance in the household, the hard coal and the soft coal which I put into my stove; the wood, of which he brought his little quota for grandmother’s fire; the hammer, the pincers and file he was so eager to use; the ...”

“... books. The lawyer George Templeton Strong, whose massive diary brings back to life the vast meals, lively clubs and busy streets of mid-19th-century New York, had self-diagnosed his bad case of bibliomania in 1842 and when he built his house organised his extensive library with a care worthy of Elia himself. No wonder then that he bought nine of Lamb’s ...”

“... professor Liu Qing was ‘coupled’ with the economist Xue Zhaofeng (imagine David Runciman and Adam Tooze playing a warring couple on James Corden’s Late Late Show). Liu now gets stopped in the street by fans asking for autographs and selfies. His showbusiness experience has prompted him to think about how far removed academia is from everyday ...”

“... of degradation’, he had occasional fits of relative jollity, as in the successful and lively novel of 1889, The Town Traveller. Less Dickensian than Wellsian, this novel is brightened by that rare person in Gissing, a high-spirited, noisy girl, whose relations with ‘minor clerks’ is part of the subject. ‘Belonging to a class ...”

“... of life, outrageous ranter and charismatic humbug is already present in the early Sartor Resartus, lively and opaque by turns, a book which inspired the young and bewildered their elders. A devastating social critic over-impressed by heroes and dictators, Carlyle was humane and savage, radical and racist, an agnostic quoted by churchmen and praised as ‘a ...”

“... His father – an unsuccessful businessman, later an accountant – was a Zionist, but it was his lively mother who set the tone, and she had been ‘brought up in an atmosphere of seemliness and decorum more akin to the pattern of Polish gentility than the shtetl tradition’. Zygmunt, bright second child and only son, was the darling of the family. Educated ...”

“... Knoppers’s essay in the Companion on Milton’s late political prose offers a detailed and lively account of this period when, in Milton’s symbolic code, England fell from being a happy republic into a jangling fallen monarchy. In late February 1660, Milton had published a pamphlet called The Readie and Easie Way to establish a Free Commonwealth in ...”

“... thesis of the general slide into sadism. The same evening, Shaun of the Dead opened for lively business: a black comedy in which the living dead, vexed by exclusion from globalising affluence, rise up and take over North London. There has been no let-up in the despondency since then. One hears repeatedly of the ‘Saturday Night ...”

“... been created in the last decade (in part inadvertently) is a neo-mercantile state of the sort that Adam Smith and Tocqueville despised: culturally and economically sterile, but almost impossible to dislodge. The Conservative Government has attached to itself large numbers of people by a profuse distribution of state property and state favours: by the ...”