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“... The most sordid, even depraved literature of our time, soft-core pornography possibly apart, is the political memoir or biography. In the United States these are now rushed to the press within a few weeks of the individual’s having left or been ejected from office, this in the hope of beating the benign and ineluctable forces that are returning the individual to the obscurity for which nature intended him ...”

“... of the scholarly pretences of his fellow economists and of all manner of other balderdash, John KennethGalbraith’s only reticence hides a skilfully disguised but intense puritanism. He may not suffer the classic puritan’s agonies at the thought that somebody, somewhere is having a good time, but if ...”

“... who range from newspaper editors to political historians, it may make very little difference. As John KennethGalbraith has observed, changing the top man in important business corporations rarely affects the price of their shares on the market. A rapid glance at the history of the USA also suggests scepticism about ...”

“... economists, and presumably almost everybody else, think these ideas to be for the most part dotty. Galbraith obviously thinks so, though he does not enter directly into the matter of Rational Expectations. Instead he tells us of a young economist who, like his creator, has found evidence, from tulipomania and the South Sea Bubble to the market crashes of 1929 ...”

“... peaceful redistribution is not only possible but easy. Read against this background. Professor Galbraith’s collection of book reviews, essays and travel pieces is doubly disappointing. Annals of an Abiding Liberal is a classic example of vanity publishing. It has no message – except, perhaps, that Galbraith is an ...”

“... classes have been more skilful than most in avoiding being hanged from lamposts. But, as J.K. Galbraith notes in a new introduction to his reissued classic The Affluent Society, a shift of political power to the affluent has taken place since the book was published in 1958. Is he right to look back at the growth of the Welfare State as ‘a ...”

“... discriminating and curiously detached study of the Cambridge fogeys – Michael Oakeshott, John Casey, Maurice Cowling and Roger Scruton – with side-glances at Shirley Robin Letwin and the conservative potential in Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot. Other than that, some of the conservatives are closer to liberalism than others; some ...”

“... of the IWW, the Communist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Louis Tikas (a union leader gunned down in John D. Rockefeller Jr’s ‘Ludlow Massacre’ of striking copper miners and their families), but also recognises the corporate and state industrial violence and denial of labour freedom that was a distinctive feature of the ‘American ...”

“... socialist economy, get anything from Milton Friedman – as you could, say, from Paul Samuelson or John KennethGalbraith, two US economists who are well-known in reformist circles and the availability of whose work in translation pre-dates Gorbachev. Does Aganbegyan not understand this? Or is he, in the Soviet ...”

“... speak, 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 ...”

“... minister, I’ll never again be as great as I was at Winchester.’ ‘Dick’ is immortalised by John Betjeman: Broad of Church and Broad of Mind, Broad Before and Broad Behind. ‘Dick’ competes with Auden for the affections of a rugby-player – I cherish this bit because years later, in a villainous wine-bar called the Bung Hole, Crossman told a group ...”

“... Smith Institute for the Criminally Insane, banging the same drum in the Independent. Not long ago John Bird and John Fortune did a sketch about the privatisation of air. These days it scarcely seems unthinkable. 28 February. There have been football riots in Bruges, where Chelsea have been playing, with, responsible for ...”