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“... the Sixties have refined it. Hayek’s argument, as Yergin and Stanislaw do not quite say, but as Keynes saw clearly and said very colourfully, strains credulity. He claimed that there is a ‘natural’ rate of interest. This is determined by the balance between people’s decisions to spend or to save. The more they save, the higher it is. Banks interfere ...”

“... respect and even awe, and his personality inspired a great and lasting affection. John Maynard Keynes – who held Ramsey’s gifts as an economist in enormously high regard – has written of his ‘bulky Johnsonian frame, his spontaneous gurgling laugh’ and ‘the simplicity of his feelings and reactions’, which, he said, blended ‘most ...”

“... flat-roofed, cuboid form of the houses, even the way they were spaced: it looked like Milton Keynes. To the left, towards the sea, the view was disorientingly different. It reminded me of an illustration in a book I had as a child of how the north European plain would have looked at the end of the Pleistocene era. Under a grey sky, the flatlands ...”

“... lain at the heart of all Peter Clarke’s previous work, on ‘new’ Liberalism before 1914, and Keynes and ‘progressivism’ thereafter. But we may wonder what the General Editor had to say when he read these pages: his response is perhaps to be found in the Epilogue, which is a mismatch of comic proportions. Here the idea that ‘the rise of the welfare ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... There is, as Richard Graves points out, no general biography of Housman. The books about him by Laurence Housman, Grant Richards and Percy Withers are valuable, because these men knew Housman and could describe him: but they are not biographies. George Watson’s A.E. Housman: A Divided Life is more like one, but it is not quite one; of Norman Marlow and Maude Hawkins I say nothing ...”

“... a reflection of the hold which Eton has over Britain’s Establishment that a talented writer like Richard Ollard can devote a year or more of his time to a book about a single school during a short period of its history. Where else in the world could such a book be written and not gather dust at the back of old-fashioned bookshops? Ollard mentions in his ...”

“... of the war, after noting the importance of manufacturing for Britain’s ability to pay her way, Keynes regretted ‘the celebrated inefficiency of British manufacturers’: the only hope, he thought, was for ‘the American Air Force (it is now too late to hope for much from the enemy) by some sad geographic slip to destroy every factory on the North-East ...”

“... on stiffs.com are egged on with a ‘newest stiffs’ page (current features: Ray Bradbury, Richard Dawson) and the lure of ‘cyberboner’ windfalls for those who manage to pick the next celebs to go. All this elicits from Sandel a mixture of bafflement and revulsion. In fact, as Sandel recognises, the line between insurance and gambling was blurred ...”

“... seminal figure, for he crossed the barrier between social and economic policy and, going beyond Keynes, anticipated many of the problems of the post-war mixed economy. For a while, it seemed as if Butskellism – which was the official Keynesianism – had solved everything. Moreover, it was widely supposed that the Welfare State with its provision ‘from ...”

“... mythography, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Bertrand Russell, J.B.S. Haldane and John Maynard Keynes (for being a renegade Eton-and-King’s man who thought the college needed shaking up). Lytton Strachey returned James’s contempt: ‘It’s odd that the provost of Eton should still be aged 16. A life without a jolt.’ The only modern innovations that ...”

“... six million pounds in gold was paid out in just three days. In ‘War and the Financial System’, Keynes denounced the banks for exacerbating the panic in the City: ‘The banks revived for a few days the old state,’ he wrote, ‘of which hardly a living Englishman had a memory, in which the man who had £50 in a stocking was better off than the man who had ...”

“... the Oxford Movement pullulated with passionate attachments; two of the most frank avowals, which Richard Jenkyns quotes in his masterly study of the Victorian conception of Ancient Greece, came from Disraeli. Of course there were in the Nineties the Uranians and the aesthetes, disciples of Cory or Symonds or Carpenter, who justified their inclinations by ...”

“... that, broadly speaking, is what is happening right now. People are sitting on that first tenner. Richard Feynman was once asked what he would pass on if the whole edifice of modern scientific knowledge had been lost, and all he could give to posterity was a single sentence. What axiom would convey the maximum amount of scientific information in the fewest ...”

“... to drench the parade of Enlightenment optimism about human possibility. The Radical writer Richard Price reckoned that an expanding population was a good thing, and that it would follow inevitably from more virtuous forms of government. Condorcet foresaw endless social progress, an egalitarian society in which technological advance would provide for an ...”