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“... which is Christopher Hibbert’s two-volume study published nearly thirty years ago. The late E.A. Smith, who sadly died between the writing and the publication of this biography, thought that all previous studies were ‘to some degree superficial, and most follow the view that George IV was a dissolute, pleasure-loving dilettante and a feeble, ineffective ...”

“... complex, rather petulant, and too fastidious personality. Indeed the haze becomes a halo.’ Dr Smith does not deal in haloes. In this fine book he has dispersed the haze and added greatly to our knowledge. His researches establish that, in early life, ‘Grey became a whig by accident, and a reformer by miscalculation.’ Grey possessed no great powers of ...”

“... By cutting trees, draining marshes and tilling the soil, European colonists had inaugurated an era of global warming that would save the planet. Buffon was probably alone among his contemporaries in anticipating the Anthropocene. But theories of man-made climate change were widespread in the 18th century. Like their French counterparts to the north, the ...”

“... 1850s. According to the Egyptologist E.A. Wallis Budge, when the British Museum assistant George Smith first read the cuneiform in 1872, he ‘jumped up and rushed about the room in a great state of excitement, and, to the astonishment of those present, began to undress himself’.The tablet was one of more than thirty thousand that formed the Royal Library ...”

“... Cuneiform studies have come far since 1872, when George Smith, assistant keeper in the Oriental Department of the British Museum, engrossed the December meeting of the Society of Biblical Archaeology with a paper on ‘The Chaldean Account of the Deluge’. Among the tablets recovered from Assurbanipal’s library at Nineveh he had found an account of a world-wide flood which resembled the narrative of Genesis not only in its main outline but even in detail ...”

“... are reminded, ‘Malthus was as much the successor to Abraham Tucker and William Palcy as to Adam Smith, and as much the contemporary of someone like Bishop Sumner, who did so much to make his doctrines acceptable in Anglican circles, as of his friend Ricardo.’ Macaulay, on the other hand, is to be visualised, as he so often visualised himself, addressing ...”

“... bibliography (‘a complete set of Petra Christian ... the likes of Abe Merit, Clark Ashton Smith, C.L. Moore, Sax Rohmer, H. Warner Munn and William Hope Hodgson ... an Australian edition of Beyond the Barrier of space by Pel Torro’) or by the brands of whisky it takes to energise the drifter, the psychic geographer. Decisions as crucial as ...”