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“... of O’Brian’s fictional heroes, Jack Aubrey, with the passion for natural history of another, Stephen Maturin. Moreover O’Brian’s accounts in his novels of 18th-century seamanship are, like Tolstoy’s battle pieces, better historical description than most historians manage: it was clear that the variety of incident in Banks’s voyage to the Great ...”

“... Fall. They flicked through my record collection and asked me about the band’s frontman, Mark E. Smith, and his lyrics. ‘What is “mithering”?’ they wanted to know. ‘And what is “cash and carry”?’ Smith, Curtis and Morrissey created a version of Manchester that journalists and photographers began to define ...”

“... binge. ‘Some people say that life is the thing but I prefer reading,’ as Logan Pearsall Smith put it; and the rich succulence of Yerofeev’s Russian, not really translatable although Stephen Mulrine makes a good and brave attempt at it, begins after a few pages to give us the gloriously static feel of Russian ...”

“... to be a mysterious cove comprehensible only to his pals (among whom Waugh did not number himself). Stephen Spender, Waugh declared, had been granted at birth all the fashionable literary neuroses but his fairy godmother ‘quite forgot the gift of literary skill’. (Once celebrated as the Shelley of the Thirties, he was later described by Geoffrey Grigson as ...”

“... Aspinall’s notable work Politics and the Press (1949) does it for the period 1780 to 1850, and Stephen Koss pays full tribute to his predecessor. Professor Koss is one of the few American historians of the top rank writing about modern British political history (as opposed to pre-revolution English history). He is producing a work which, to judge from ...”

“... from it. He was to profit, too, from the ambiguous kindness and patronage of Logan Pearsall Smith, brother-in-law of Bertrand Russell and bachelor son of rich American Quakers. He was famous for the trouble he took over his polished style, and was compiling A Treasury of English Aphorisms. He employed Connolly as his secretary and research ...”

“... guns, thereby beginning the cycle of trade all over again. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith ascribed the relative lack of African economic development to the ‘continual danger’ that supposedly confronted the continent’s inhabitants. In a sentence that defined the problem legitimate commerce sought to address, Thomas Malthus went ...”

“... doesn’t always have the necessary knowingness behind it – as it does, for instance, in Stevie Smith, whom Barbara Pym admired. (Charles Burkhart points out that Ivy Compton-Burnett’s influence sometimes seems to put more bite into Pym’s prose.) But whatever personal significance and therapeutic value Civil to Strangers may have had for the author, it ...”

“... central to the sense of what made people different in America, ever since the English Captain John Smith began exploring the rivers of Virginia and got captured by the Indians. These are symptoms, not of a single life, but of a whole ...”

“... objects of curiosity.’ In a piece written for a Tate Gallery retrospective of his friend Matthew Smith, it is the ‘beauty pure and simple’ of Smith’s nudes than he particularly admires. Concluding (1948) is also a country house novel, but the property has passed into the hands of the state, and the ominously elderly ...”

“... founding fathers anyway. (Both things are more or less right.) It is probably because John Smith, who led the party from July 1992 until his death in 1994, would not be prematurely enrolled in New Labour that the depiction of him here is so bleak. The man who might have led Labour to victory, thus bypassing the possibility of a Blair leadership, is not ...”

“... rejected by the modern synthesis. These quotations come from a recent paper in Palaeobiology by Stephen Jay Gould. What is the new theory? Is it indeed likely to replace the currently orthodox ‘neo-Darwinian’ view? Proponents of the new view make a minimum and a maximum claim. The minimum claim is an empirical one concerning the nature of the fossil ...”

“... not all that many years later the most right-wing, authoritarian home secretary in living memory. Stephen Pollard’s biography tells us what happened but it doesn’t quite tell us why. One of the reasons for Blunkett’s status in contemporary politics is that he was born into real hardship, a qualification which is much less common in the Labour Party than ...”

“... nearly forgets Beckett, and fixes his attention on Philip Larkin, Hardy, Swift, Coleridge, Sydney Smith, Christina Rossetti or another. I can’t believe that he chose to deliver these Clarendon Lectures as a hodge-podge. It is more probable that he observed the impressionism that Beckett ascribed to Proust: ‘By his impressionism I mean his non-logical ...”

“... influence at an early age, and later subjected to university in large, impersonal classes. So Adam Smith, a mother’s boy all his life, can be seen as free from parental domination because he was a posthumous child. Camic offers various references to the Scottish concept of patriarchy, but the belief that parental domination over thought and behaviour can ...”