Leslie Mitchell
Homo Economics
Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life
By Nicholas Phillipson
Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 346pp £25 order from our bookshop
For some the process of dying offers a welcome opportunity to obliterate the past. Adam Smith insisted that all his private papers should be destroyed, and personally supervised the conflagration that consumed them. It was his dearest wish that he should be known exclusively from what he had left behind on the printed page.
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