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“... Stevie Smith said that she was straightforward, but not simple, which is a version of not waving but drowning. She presented to the world the face which is invented when reticence goes over to the attack, and becomes mystification. If you visited Blake and were told not to sit on a certain chair because it was for the spirit of Michelangelo, or if Emily Dickinson handed you a single flower, you needed time to find out how far the mystification was meant to keep you at a distance, and to give you something to talk about when you got home ...”

“... I’m sometimes told that the Scots don’t like Thatcherism,’ Margaret Thatcher told the Scottish Conservative Conference in 1988. ‘Well, I find that hard to believe – because the Scots invented Thatcherism, long before I was thought of.’ The Scot she meant was Adam Smith, a figure popularly identified as the founder of economics, an apostle of capitalism and honoured prophet of the new right ...”

“... This biography gets off to a bad start with its title. The writer called Stevie Smith was also a celebrity called Stevie – a spiky sprite who was famous for being unfashionable. This creature thrived on being a spinster, which licensed her to be a bit cuckoo, and on speaking her hard words from a spindly frame decked out like a schoolgirl’s – as if it were a feat to think behind a fringe ...”

“... Like many others I have been puzzled by the reaction to John Smith’s death. It was reported as though it were at least that of a prime minister, and his funeral was, as the BBC noted, in effect a state funeral. The decision of both the BBC and ITV to double the ordinary length of their evening news broadcasts on the day of his death could be put down to the social democratish inclinations of the programmers, but the speed with which the coverage had to be assembled suggests that it was more instinctive ...”

“... and Lady Mount Cashell, Helena Jane and me pack’d in the Family Coach, with Mary Lawless, Mary Smith, Blanchois, and William in another carriage, driving full speed, nine Irish Adventurers, to the French dominions.’ Two at least of these Irish adventurers were as ready as William Wordsworth had been a decade earlier to feel what bliss it was to be ...”

“... in the home he had chosen for them, and his frustrations grew dark. Recently, when the actor Matt Smith was introduced to Prince William and the prince was told Smith would soon be playing his grandfather in an epic Netflix series, The Crown, William offered only one word. ‘Legend,’ he said, as if they were talking ...”

“... in English literature. The novel has strong connections with the ‘Jacobin’ novels of Charlotte Smith, William Godwin, Amelia Opie and Thomas Holcroft. The use of engagements and marriages as symptoms of the state of society belongs peculiarly to Charlotte Smith as a Revolutionary subject. To ...”

“... selectively, finding value in Locke on government, or praising the free market philosophy of Adam Smith. Those were the days (to paraphrase Todd Gitlin) when the right got the White House and the left got the English departments, where the Enlightenment was seen as quaint at best and as the source of Western claims to superiority at worst. The battles of the ...”

“... by the entry first consulted can be led on a treasure hunt for further clues. Start with Adam Smith and you find a picture and a few key dates in his career. But see Free Trade. Here not only the meaning of the term but also the influence of the policy is suggested. See Richard Cobden. This leads us to the Anti-Corn Law League, and in turn to John ...”

“... yesterday’s paper provide a similar check? Obviously not: yet on what principle shall we include Margaret Thatcher and Bessie Smith (both in Collins) and exclude some John Smith who had to be rescued after a fall in Snowdonia? The answer is, of course, common sense – and on the whole ...”

“... wery poor, he rushes out of his lodgings, and eats oysters in reg’lar desperation.’ Drew Smith says in Modern Cookery that oysters, being high in calcium and in vitamins A and D, to some extent fulfilled the role that milk has come to play in the modern diet. But British oyster production fell precipitously between the 1850s and 1880s. The decline ...”

“... schools in the US, including Vassar and Sarah Lawrence, meanwhile, began to admit men, as did Lady Margaret Hall and St Anne’s in Oxford, and Girton in Cambridge. In an extraordinarily short space of time, coeducation had ceased to be a distant possibility and was in widespread operation. One obvious explanation for the speed with which single-sex education ...”

“... met Degas and Rodin. He had also been singled out by the woman who was to become his first wife: Margaret Dunlop, a Scot, ten years his senior and married. She divorced and became Mrs Epstein in 1906, which she remained until she died 41 years later, having acted as mother to some of his children, managed his financial affairs, acquiesced in his love affairs ...”

“... voice always childlike in its directness. In her lifetime this prompted comparisons with Stevie Smith, which Comyns did not care for, and indeed she had little in common with Smith, the suburban celibate whose authorial self is firmly if oddly poised, while Comyns’s always seems at the mercy of events. For the reader of ...”

“... their sleeping bags a thousand feet below, there is a sentence that lets you peer right into Adam Smith’s world. He is talking about Cameron of Lochiel, whose decision, against his better judgment, to come out for Prince Charles Edward Stuart in 1745 won the clans for the Pretender and doomed the ancient culture of the Highlands to extinction. ‘That ...”