In 1817, David Ricardo, a pioneering economist, noted that abundance in nature was rarely rewarded: "where she is munificently beneficent she always works gratis".
It is encouraging that on both sides of the Atlantic shareholders have been taking a tough line with corporate boards that reward the boss munificently while the company flounders.
Though he looks younger, and naturally provides munificently for his kids, who live mostly in Florida, you sense that his failure to settle down preoccupies him.
In the old days, a circus was a big variety show, made up of acts — the lion tamer, the fire-eater — m.c.'d by a ringmaster in a top hat, and presented munificently in three rings, so that you could choose what to look at.
I munificently doled out smiles and handshakes while maintaining a steady course for the front door.
They asked me to readoff a result or temper a calamity like I was involvedin the unfolding reaction with everythingelse, they wanted me to reside at 478 Pavilion Avenueand the story would resolve itself munificently.
But then James has always been a generous critic – not in the sense of letting bad work off the hook, or in showering good work with superlatives, but in giving munificently of his time, and in using it to pay careful attention.
Ridley's summary of the argument is: Given that government has funded science munificently from its huge tax take, it would be odd if it had not found out something.
David Chipperfield, architect of the munificently rebuilt Neues Museum, Berlin, completed last year, and of such refined arts buildings as the Stirling prize-winning Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach am Neckar, has been named today as the recipient of the Royal Gold Medal for architecture.
This was Wengerball in excelsis on a muggy, grey north London late afternoon, the footballing equivalent of one of those Evening-With-Ronnie-Corbett-style affairs, where some garlanded old ham gets to stand centre-stage and beam munificently while his favourite anecdotes, his most wonderful personal qualities are paraded beneath the studio lights.
On paper, FFS looks not unlike Elton John and Leon Russell's The Union, a high-profile artist munificently extending a hand to a formative influence who long ago slipped into cult status.
