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“... To think back at all is to fall quickly, almost instinctively, on two names – Colin, the name of my adoptive father, and Maureen, the name of my adoptive mother – and on the significant word ‘adopted’, which has the weight of a name. Appended to this little trio of terms, like an intake of breath at the end of a short annoucement, is the nameless presence of the ‘birth mother’, as she’s mostly called by adoption experts: the first mother, that’s to say, also the eternal mother-in-waiting ...”

“... the media attention ‘race issues’ receive in this country – the O.J. Simpson verdict, Susan Smith alleging that a black man killed her children, the Million Man March and Louis Farrakhan, Colin Powell and his non-bid for office, Affirmative Action and so on and on. Anyone would think that Americans talk about race all ...”

“... decades ago disappeared, or has it merely become less visible, less garish? A Smell of Burning, Colin Grant’s fourth book (he has also written about reggae and about Marcus Garvey), is preoccupied by questions of stigma – haunted by them, even. The book is a hybrid of memoir, medical history and social history of a kind that has become familiar in the ...”

“... label of NW2; there are houses that go for £800,000. It’s where White Teeth is set. Zadie Smith won a kind of lottery: £250,000 in a two-book deal, and there’s a £5 million BBC adaptation on the way. She was one of the deserving – just a step away from the prize-winning bus-driver novelist – only 23, half-Jamaican, half-English, parents ...”

“... of information from every quarter of the globe, are cumulatively astounding. Like Hume, Adam Smith and Gibbon, Burke was a genius of Britain’s moderate establishmentarian Enlightenment. He was not – or at the very least not quite – the reactionary Prince of Darkness of leftist demonology; though there is no disguising the fact that he equated ...”

“... it The Canterbury Pilgrims.Two new versions​ of ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’, by Zadie Smith and the Australian novelist Karen Brooks, show contemporary writers continuing to adapt Alysoun’s story. The Wife of Willesden, Smith’s first play, had its premiere at Kilburn’s Kiln Theatre in 2021. In her ...”

“... than on the sociological context of the environment in which this message was received. Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ is only the most obvious product of a rich and neglected interaction within the Enlightenment of naturalistic explanation with the more distant and depersonalised versions of Christian providentialism. There are some very notable ...”

“... must have been picked some time ago. The ‘outstanding achievement’ prize goes to General Colin Powell, and will be presented by Barbara Walters. The ‘humanitarian’ award goes to Diana Spencer and will be presented by Henry Kissinger. In other words, a single well-placed grenade could remove the whole beating heart of the international celebrity ...”

“... posture – plausibly enough – as custodians of Enlightenment principles. Hume and Adam Smith are celebrated as pointing the way for Hayek, Friedman and public-choice theorists. But conservative flirtation with the Enlightenment takes a decidedly odd turn in the US, where the leaders of the American Enlightenment are separated from their historical ...”

“... 1969, the Times ran a piece entitled ‘Put a Poet on the Moon’: ‘I am not carping,’ Colin Webb wrote, ‘about Neil Armstrong’s “That’s one small step for a man, a giant leap for mankind” – whoever wrote it … A British astronaut would have stuck in a flag and said: “I name this moon Elizabeth.”’ And Michael Collins – the ...”

“... When a lie is discovered it isn’t just that trust has been betrayed: it’s not simply that Colin’s wife discovers that Colin has been in the arms of a glamorous Russian spy rather than (as he said) in the library. The lie-ee is made to see herself and her desires as manipulable and herself as credulous. The fury of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... D’Ancona traces the contempt George Osborne feels for the otherwise unemployable Iain Duncan Smith. Osborne, indeed, emerges a much more attractive figure – reflective, compassionate and with a social conscience – than his usual portrayal in the press. But D’Ancona doesn’t engage with the question of how the mildly progressive Liberal Democrats ...”

“... and sees that it’s time for her meeting with Bernard Stonestreet, an ad exec in ‘a Paul Smith suit, more specifically the 118 jacket and the 11T trouser’. Cayce, by contrast, wears a ‘museum-grade replica of a US MA-1 flying jacket . . . created by Japanese obsessives’. Afterwards there’s lunch, ‘the food California-inflected Vietnamese ...”

“... Street in London’ (1906). My view of the British Museum is unlikely to change, though had Colin St John Wilson’s designs for a new British Library south of the BM been realised I wouldn’t be able to approach it as I do now, up to the spot where Hammershøi painted from his rooms above 67 Great Russell Street. Today it’s Celia Paul who has a ...”