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“... to copy them out. What strikes first is Gurney’s unfailing touch with what Barbara Herrnstein Smith has taught us to call ‘closures’. Even in Rewards of Wonder this had been evident, when brutally rhymed pieces would abandon rhyme so as to end on a heart-breaking cadence. Similarly here many a rough-and-ready piece is all but redeemed at the last ...”

“... view of the period. He might also have marked those optimistic economists such as Adam Smith, who remarked in The Wealth of Nations on ‘the universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people’. Britain around this time is portrayed by Gatrell as a chronically unsettled country. There had been two hundred sedition trials in ...”

“... publication, he was nominated for election as an associate of the Linnean Society. According to David Attenborough, Lear is ‘the finest bird artist there ever was’. His drawings were primarily intended to help scientists identify species, yet his birds are exhibitionists as well as exhibits, always more than an instance that confirms a rule. The same ...”

“... the cacophony of what was called ‘Malthusianism’ through the 19th and 20th centuries. Sydney Smith said of the Essay that it was a book ‘much more talked about than read’, both by admirers and critics; certainly the later career of Malthusian thought and commentary breaks free of detailed engagement with the late 18th-century pastiche of moral ...”

“... landowner. Her father was Henry, Lord Morley, the scholarly translator of Petrarch and Plutarch. David Starkey begins an essay on Lord Morley by wondering whether we should class him like Prufrock as an ‘attendant lord’: ‘one that will do/To swell a progress, start a scene or two,/Advise the prince.’ Lord Morley never did become a royal ...”

“... of Michael Portillo. The other candidates are unknown and rather unknowable, though Iain Duncan-Smith, the spear-carrier of Thatcherism, is not what the Conservative Party now needs. There appears, to an outsider, little ideological coherence to the contest. Clarke, a genially tolerant figure and a strong Europhile, has some surprising supporters, including ...”

“... Mannheim, Merton, Parsons, Radcliffe-Brown and more. In his preface he thanks Adorno, Henry Nash Smith, I.A. Richards, Talcott Parsons and Peter Laslett, among others. The standard caricature of the Cambridge-influenced criticism of the postwar years represents it as blunderingly empirical and cosily parochial: these stereotypes wilt and shrivel when ...”

“... Moscow often commented on the exhaustive, repeated recitation of the tsar’s titles. For Thomas Smith in 1605 this was ‘ever their custom’. Miege, less patiently, described it as ‘troublesome and ridiculous’. And there is an element of absurdity even in Milton’s salutation, as though the list of fantastical-sounding lordships running from Moscow ...”

“... about having to put on so much make-up and even more about the bore of taking it all off, Maggie Smith seems to enjoy transforming herself into Miss Shepherd, today showing me her grey mottled legs as if they are a newly completed landscape. She’s particularly pleased with the ulcers she has incorporated into the decorative scheme, displaying them with the ...”

“... I can. It’s not my sort of book at all, but it leaves me wanting to read his other books. Zadie Smith thinks it a masterpiece and says so on the cover. Certainly it’s a new way of writing a novel.25 May, Yorkshire. To Leeds this morning in an empty train with neither of us feeling very clever but revived by a lovely lunch at Sous le Nez in Leeds, mine ...”

“... the Black Dwarf.’ We had a vote, and everyone was in favour, which was rare – I think even David Mercer, who was the most grumpy attendant at these meetings. So that’s how it happened, and we raised money for a broadsheet, the first broadsheet on Mayday 1968, and people poured in with offers of help. When I think back on it, it was quite ...”

“... owners (the shareholders)? The question is as old as the joint stock company as a legal form. Adam Smith suspected the answer was ‘no’. In Volume III of Capital, Marx warned that directors might swindle shareholders, although he also welcomed the growing separation of managerial control from legal ownership as a transitional step towards socialism. In ...”

“... the commanding officer in Vietnam, was asking for 206,000 more troops. Neil Sheehan and Hedrick Smith reported this leak, which was accurate and had a devastating effect on Congress and the American people. It did not come from Ellsberg, but ‘as I observed the effect of this leak,’ he recalls, ‘it was as if clouds had suddenly opened. I realised ...”

“... quickly, and aloud.’ (The faux-solicitous note recalls one of his best jokes, in a review of David Lodge’s Working with Structuralism: ‘His title,’ Carey said, ‘has a making-the-best-of-it ring, rather like “Surviving with Sciatica”.’) Based on this account, there is not much doubt where his own preference in the 20th century lies and it is ...”