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“... was not quite as radical a leap forward as is sometimes made out. The counting board, too, drew on a system of place-value that relied on a spatial representation of number – its idea of zero was an absence rather than an abstraction. What was new about Arabic numerals was their speed: writing out calculations was much faster than the cumbersome ...”

“... and are subject to what Madison called ‘the equalising tendency of the laws’, or, in Adam Smith’s formulation, ‘that equal and impartial administration of justice which renders the rights of the meanest subject respectable to the greatest’. Smith tells us bluntly that ‘the mean rapacity, the monopolising ...”

“... to the 1970 Election as the politics of ‘Selsdon Man’, after the hotel where the strategists drew up the programme; it is now familiarly known as Thatcherism. Of this creed Joseph was the high priest (or chief anthropologist). He organised countless study groups, striving after his own high standards of intellectual rigour. He began to acquire a harrowed ...”

“... to the Mormons, however, Jewish seafaring was an ancient tradition. America, claimed Joseph Smith, was populated by a remnant of seafaring Jews. The Book of Mormon tells of a group of Jews living in the early sixth century BCE under King Zedekiah in Jerusalem, who, in an attempt to escape from an unfriendly government, sailed, via the Straits of ...”

“... over to Disraeli’s side was the uproar about the Turks and the Bulgarian Atrocities. Goldwin Smith bitterly pointed out to Gladstone ‘the vast increase in the circulation of the Telegraph since it turned Turk’, and the decline in the sales of the Daily News, which took the Gladstonian line. ‘It seems to me a terrible indictment of the public ...”

“... like the Society of Dilettanti. When, early in George III’s reign, the Duchess of Newcastle drew up her own guide to ‘what’s on in London’, she listed not merely theatres, pleasure gardens and so on, but ‘the Macaroni Club, Boodle’s Club ... the Goose-trees Club, Savoir Vivre Club, Bill of Rights, Royal Society, Antiquarian ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in all its varieties. He championed ‘ongoing renovation’ in public life. However, he drew the line at the ‘new idiom of reform’ he discerned in the French Revolution. From Burke’s earliest publication, the Vindication of Natural Society (1756), an ironic rebuttal of Bolingbroke (who, unusually, was a deist as well as a Tory), he had opposed ...”

“... as an indispensable resource for understanding the Victorians. With the possible exception of Adam Smith, there can be few economic gurus who have been so vulnerable to sustained political hijacking by left and right. From the liberal luvvies who ran the Cobden clubs of the late 19th century through to the libertarian think-tanks of Chicago and London in the ...”

“... in 1889 and completed in the 1950s – fuelled the guerrilla struggle against the regime of Ian Smith, whose Rhodesian Front opposed black majority rule, the matter was never properly addressed when Britain came back into the picture to effect a constitutional transition to independence under majority rule. Southern Rhodesia became Zimbabwe in 1980, but the ...”

“... was only perfunctorily chased in England, it seems (according to a recent study by Robert W. Smith) that this was partly due to an assumption among the élite that the optical discovery ought to be the property of Cambridge, the director of whose observatory, James Challis, however, trailed his feet rather than trained his eyes. Because Le Verrier had ...”

“... made him see red. Jews and the high finance.’Buchan’s biographers, starting with Janet Adam Smith in 1965, tend to hold up this turnaround as evidence that he wasn’t an antisemite. They point to his handful of Jewish friends, to his Zionism – a cause he learned about from his friend Arthur Balfour, who set him on the path of writing thrillers by ...”

“... from her white family before she died in 1870, ten years after she was recaptured. When Coho Smith, himself a former captive, visited Naudah in east Texas and spoke to her in Comanche, she screamed and threw herself at his feet, begging to be taken home. When Smith refused, she told him that her heart was always crying ...”

“... What Next: How to Get the Best from Brexit. Striding into the sunlight, we encounter Adam Smith and David Ricardo and the slightly more contemporary figure of Theresa May, whose ambition to make Britain ‘the global leader in free trade’ Hannan quotes approvingly. Free trade is the great elixir. ‘Free trade doesn’t simply put more money into ...”

“... under their feet. But it is hard not to speculate about what might have been different had John Smith lived to become prime minister in Blair’s stead. Whether you approve of it or not, Blair’s success in outflanking the traditional party of the right from within the traditional party of the left was achieved with remarkable rhetorical and political ...”