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“... 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 ...”

“... he was taught and befriended – as were his Birmingham contemporaries Walter Allen and Reggie Smith – by a young lecturer in the Classics Department, Louis MacNeice. Reed had a remarkable speaking voice and a gift for mimicry (and for assuming the accents of a class not his own), and as an undergraduate he acted in and produced plays, which may have led ...”

“... years: there’s an intriguing, speculative account of the Thesmophoria, for example, by Barbara Smith in the current issue of Baetyl. (This new journal coincidentally takes its name from the black stone into which the goddess Cybele metamorphosed in order to escape Zeus on one of his rampages – more flesh and stone in opposition.) Sennett follows the ...”

“... of visionary.’ I asked one class to impersonate famous people. One student pretended to be Will Smith and tried to slap a classmate. Another wanted to be Brigitte Macron. ‘Do you know that your husband is the most hated man in France?’ her neighbour asked her.Newspapers here frequently characterise schools in the banlieues as cradles of violence. After ...”

“... copyright law; there were the pioneering academics of Enlightenment Scotland, among them Adam Smith, who made ‘rhetoric and belles lettres’ a university discipline and exported it to North America. As good a claimant as any is the London bookseller Jacob Tonson (1656-1736). With his hard-nosed nephew Jacob the younger (1682-1735), Tonson dominated the ...”

“... manage, but often ended his day with an impromptu dance in the studio. English mezzotinter John Smith (1652-1742) grew rich and arrogant engraving Godfrey Kneller paintings and towards the end of his career dealt with customers while seated on his close-stool. Gaspard Duchange (1662-1757), ashamed of the erotic prints he’d engraved after Correggio’s ...”

“... it could have belonged to someone else with the same initials – the Stratford draper William Smith, for instance – but the possibility remains strong that it was Shakespeare’s. It is certainly a genuine ring of the period, and there are other pointers in its favour. The field where it was found, Mill Close, was on land that Shakespeare had owned: it ...”

“... of an anthology is whether it convincingly brings fresh material forward. Michael Harper, Dave Smith, Albert Goldbarth: Vendler takes risks at the Contemporary end of her Book, and mostly carries them off. Though one looks in vain for Hass or Dulpen, there is much to please, including a clutch of decorously unfeminist women. Louise Glück, for ...”

“... MacNeice, Dillon, Cleverdon and Bridson, and new ones like W. R. Rodgers, Terence Tiller, R. D. Smith and Rayner Heppenstall. MacNeice was henceforth one of a group of literary men whose social life revolved around certain pubs in Soho, Fitzrovia or the immediate environs of Broadcasting House. Dylan Thomas was much in use as an actor and a voice as well as ...”

“... solemn music as to approach the clerihew, something about which Hill makes a knowing joke: ‘Sir Christopher Wren, in or around the year seventeen ten, went to dine with some men, memorially, with a view to re-edifying the clerihew.’ Wren went to dine with some men in a clerihew by E.C. Bentley, the inventor of the form: ‘He said, “if anyone calls/Say ...”

“... by their peers – that much was certain. The Clarence Thomas hearings and the William Kennedy Smith rape trial had introduced cable subscribers to something called the ‘Court Channel’. This service gives non-stop live coverage to high-profile trials. Cameras were allowed into the King trial, and every minute of the daytime proceedings was covered (the ...”

“... cliché: ‘his face now a tear-stained mask.’ But the books, what do they reveal? According to Christopher Ricks, the notes to Eugene Onegin have a tone of ‘patiently patrician calm’ whose ‘coolness can easily become the condescending heartlessness which so attenuates Nabokov’s fiction’. D.J. Enright found Nabokov ‘rich in what is given to few ...”

“... was generally not acceptable. ‘The valuation of the liberal individual in India,’ the late Christopher Bayly wrote in Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (2012), was ‘impregnated with the idea of sharing, generosity and compassion … dramatised by tropes from the Indian classics, the Vedanta and particularly the ...”

“... after World War One’ – and went on to describe the guilt and distress felt by Septimus Warren Smith on his return home from the war. Mr Amini said: ‘What happens to him?’ ‘He jumps out of a window.’ ‘Islam doesn’t countenance suicide,’ he said with satisfaction. I said: ‘Did you take part in Karbala Four?’ ‘Why do you ask questions ...”

“... men who cannot innovate and would have rejected the Beatles, the personal computer and Christopher Columbus’s first voyage as utter lunacy. But they don’t give up. They struggle, they sweat blood, they network in coffee bars until – at last! – they get the power and the page lead in the Financial Times; the glory and the marketing ...”