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“... understood ideas of communal loyalty took precedence over individual autonomy and freedom. John Smith had scarcely landed in Virginia in 1607 when he wrote that in America, ‘every man may be the master and owner of his own labour and land.’ This vision of economic freedom was to draw millions of newcomers to North America and inspired a relentless ...”

“... which may have wide public consequences, can only be appraised by reference to his earliest years. Anthony Clare, from his psychiatrist’s chair, would write a far more interesting profile than the average political editor. Ben Pimlott, in his brilliant biography of Hugh Dalton, caught the character of a former Chancellor of the Exchequer with great ...”

“... devote attention to the ideas behind empire. As scholars such as David Armitage, Peter Miller, Anthony Pagden, J.G.A. Pocock and Richard Tuck have reminded us repeatedly in recent years, the absence of mind which was sometimes in the past attributed to imperialism was, rather, a characteristic of some of its historians. Pagden reinforces this message in ...”

“... thing, with a ghastly woodcut on it. Nobody knew how this woodcut got on it. There was a piece by Anthony Powell called ‘A Reference for Mellors’, which was about somebody coming to Lady Chatterley for a reference for a gamekeeper. The magazine sort of launched me on a career, because Alan Pryce-Jones, who was then the editor of the TLS, gave me a lot of ...”

“... some cases wrote relevant books on them’, included David Bonavia of the Times in London, Anthony Astrachan and Hedrick Smith of the New York Times, Robert Kaiser and Kevin Klose of the Washington Post, David Satter of the Financial Times and the BBC’s Moscow correspondent Denis Blakeley. Reading the list, I found ...”

“... The Marquess of Salisbury threatened to resign if the match was allowed by the Government. Sir Anthony Eden boarded planes and flew hither and yon to talk in grave tones to the Queen. The Queen pointedly took all her dogs for a walk on one occasion, in order to avoid having to talk to her sister on such a distasteful subject. The shivering girl was told ...”

“... visibility on high, to a more sober celebration of the responsibilities of the pattern in ‘The Smith’s Anvil’:                 The smith Changes old iron into new. What he does Sings with his blows for ever afterwards. Redgrove takes a particular delight in turning the pattern inside ...”

“... Oxford, and for some time afterwards, Mackenzie could well have been one of the minor players in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time: perhaps a little like the fabled Truscott who is going to become a great poet, great actor, great statesman, great something or other. Needless to say, little more is heard of Truscott, but Mackenzie was one of ...”

“... liberal-humanist intellectuals and nobody was any longer interested in how to combine Adam Smith with the Bible, or the rule of the many with the wisdom of the few. Yet literature gives back what history has erased. In fact literature – Galsworthy, Woolf, Waugh, Wodehouse, Nancy Mitford, Compton-Burnett – has made this Victorian hybrid, the ...”

“... was that endangered species of turtle were put at risk instead. No gain without pain, then. Adam Smith, as we are reminded in Erika Szyszczak’s essay on free trade as a fundamental value in the European Union, had no problem identifying which rights were fundamental: ‘To prohibit a people,’ he wrote, ‘from making all that they can of every part of ...”

“... A number of journalists have mastered the intricacies of the Belgrano affair. Julian Haviland, Anthony Bevins and Philip Webster of the Times would all pass with first-class honours any finals examination in Belgrano Studies: but as members of the House of Commons Lobby, they necessarily have to give their attention to every ephemeral political event and ...”

“... I wonder whether he’s always been in favour of medical experiments.11 August. Neville Smith sends me a menu from Virginia Woolf’s, a restaurant and bar in the Russell Hotel, which tells prospective diners that Virginia Woolf was ‘a modernist writer’, a member of the Bloomsbury Group ‘which used to meet at 46 Gordon Square where topics for ...”

“... 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 establishment ...”

“... has something in common with the real thing as it would be written by Bishop or Plath or Stevie Smith. It is aware, too, of its own comic potentiality. So was a phrase she liked using at this time about ‘kissing the dead lips of Emily Brontë’. Unlike Barker, Elizabeth always expressed herself with the clarity of the true egotist. As recorded in By ...”

“... was an apprentice dandy but too ‘irredeemably heterosexual’ (in the words of his schoolfriend Anthony Blunt) to fully enjoy the jokes that mattered. In the Thirties, he tried hard to turn himself into a socially-conscious poet but was too riven by self-doubt, by the awareness that ‘If it were not for Lit. Hum. I might be climbing/A ladder with a ...”