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“... Sydney Smith and William Burke lived at the same time and in the same country: but at opposite ends of the spectrum of class, ends which rarely met, except in court. Such people were strangers to one another, foreigners, and could hate and suspect one another in the style that has been reserved for foreigners ...”

“... man’ – who has converted to Christianity, she says: ‘When he laughs he is like a black Sydney Smith.’ A tiny footnote points out that Sydney Smith was ‘Canon of St Paul’s and the wittiest man of his day’. Of a ‘little native boy with white mice for sale’ she remarks: ‘When I tried to ...”

“... in the late 18th century by game-preserving squires on their enclosed estates. As the Reverend Sydney Smith said, ‘There is a sort of horror in thinking of a whole land filled with lurking engines of death – machinations against human life under every green tree – traps and guns in every dusky dell and bosky bourn – the lords of manors eyeing ...”

“... horrors of gout, will find much of the information in these pages riveting. Gout was likened by Sydney Smith to walking on his eyeballs. It not only created fiery anguish in the big toe but caused a white precipitation at the knuckles. Horace Walpole wrote of ‘chalky rills running from the fingers’ and ‘a hail of chalkstones and liquid ...”

“... as agreeable to myself as possible’, as one officer wrote.Many led lonely and unfulfilled lives. Sydney Smith had a distinguished career in the church and was a founding editor of the Edinburgh Review, but for two years after Oxford he worked as a curate in the small, isolated, desperately poor village of Netheravon in Wiltshire – he complained of ...”

“... and shape for cooling splits of champagne ... You have to know these things, otherwise you die.’ Sydney Smith, as one would expect, finds wit even in the excruciating pains of gout, the ‘only enemy I do not wish to have at my feet.’ W.N.P. Barbellion, alias the diarist and biologist B.F. Cummings, who died of multiple sclerosis at the age of ...”

“... publisher of the Whig Edinburgh Review, edited by Francis Jeffrey with the frequent assistance of Sydney Smith. The Quarterly was intended as a Tory rival and enjoyed Scott’s close co-operation. After an erratic start, its middlebrow conservatism built a large and loyal readership. The correspondence suggests, however, that as with books, a lot of time ...”

“... Ricks nearly forgets Beckett, and fixes his attention on Philip Larkin, Hardy, Swift, Coleridge, Sydney Smith, Christina Rossetti or another. I can’t believe that he chose to deliver these Clarendon Lectures as a hodge-podge. It is more probable that he observed the impressionism that Beckett ascribed to Proust: ‘By his impressionism I mean his ...”

“... never been so low – certainly not since the 1640s and 1650s. ‘The House of Commons,’ Sydney Smith said in 1819, ‘is falling into contempt with the people.’ Taxes were high and times were bad, and journalists like William Cobbett were radicalising popular opinion by lambasting ‘Old Corruption’. Parliament, Cobbett stormed, was ruining ...”

“... he gave vent to his feelings in a series of Bons Mots, small format collections of the sayings of Sydney Smith, Sheridan and others, published by Dent, which Beardsley adorned with skeletons, Pierrots, angry animals and mythic beasts, wilfully at odds with the subject matter. These anti-illustrations have now been collected by Beardsley’s biographer ...”

“... child died a week after birth. The sight of Mrs Grote in a turban is supposed to have provoked Sydney Smith to the comment that at last he understood the meaning of the word ‘grotesque’, but she seems to have been an admirable person, and the memoir of her husband that she compiled as a dutiful widow is the best source for his life. He did not ...”

“... How clever of Nature to ‘choose’ Darwin to teach the world that she has, against the prevailing view of natural theology, no purpose, no teleology, no choice. No one could be more gentlemanly, cautious, desirous of conforming, unwilling to shock or upset – yet no one could be more deliberate, more stubborn in holding to an opinion once embraced – than Darwin ...”

“... Mr Murphy are of issues of American magazines in which collections of sayings have appeared. Thus Sydney Smith (without the Reverend) appears by courtesy of the Ladies’ Home Journal, and so do Heine and Lord Halifax (which Lord Halifax?). The sole Disraeli saying comes by way of Elbert Hubbard’s Scrap Book. Some of Shaw’s observations are given no ...”

“... a Boat in the same form, will have a mild idea of the task which faced the Cambridge graduate John Smith (a sizar, married with one child) when in 1819 he was hired to decipher the six volumes of Samuel Pepys’s diary on which Magdalene College had sat for over a century. Smith did not know the system of shorthand the ...”

“... it had wallowed for much of the preceding century. Its absentee incumbents, like the resentful Sydney Smith, had been called back to parish duty; the worst excesses of pluralism had been abated and simony was no longer profitable. The Army had at last found men who were prepared to perform the duties of chaplains instead of farming out the office to ...”