“... school of regard. Wharton was best known for a column he wrote in the Telegraph under the name ‘Peter Simple’, and he was pleased to see in Hill’s austere lyricism a salutary rejection of vulgar modern mores, so I am not sure what he would have made of ‘Cute, my arse’ – not to mention, from later sections of the poem, ‘a shot of jism’, ‘a ...”

“... down, never mind wind down. Brown harks back to the age when prime ministers had the leisure to read poetry (Disraeli and Gladstone), write love letters (Asquith) or take morning drinks and afternoon naps (Churchill). I imagine there are lawyers, doctors, accountants, even writers, who feel the same sense of nostalgia for a rhythm of life that’s never ...”

“... a 43-year-old former flight attendant who charged a line of police with an industrial wheelie bin. Peter Lynch, 61, joined a mob that tried to burn down a hotel housing asylum seekers in Rotherham; he was carrying a placard condemning the ‘deep state’, the World Health Organisation and Nasa. In Bristol, Ashley Harris, the 36-year-old owner of a scaffolding ...”

“... right’s swivel-eyed homophobia. A surprising number of gay men top the Trumpist pyramid (Peter Thiel, for instance, or the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent) and others lurk on its digital outskirts, but O’Neill isn’t one of them. He obviously didn’t believe his statements undermined his heterosexuality. Presumably this would be a risk only if ...”

“... by her boss, she changed her story after the US entered the war.) It’s tempting to read Trump’s decision to bomb Iran in psychological terms, something he has encouraged. ‘I may do it,’ he said on 18 June when asked by reporters. ‘I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do.’ Perhaps he wanted to avoid any impression ...”

“... Yudkowsky clout and access to a wider circle of rich libertarians and tech ultras, notably Peter Thiel. Yudkowsky introduced Thiel to Hassabis; Thiel became a founding investor in DeepMind. Thanks to Thiel, Hassabis then met Elon Musk, who also became a DeepMind backer, before co-founding OpenAI with Altman.Thiel, whose firm Palantir analyses data for ...”

“... rural China. But then he also seems to think it unimaginable that Xi, or anyone else, might have read Rabindranath Tagore or Mikhail Sholokhov (Hemingway is allowed as a possibility). What is clear is that on his tenth application, Xi was accepted as a party member. In 1975, he left the countryside to take a degree in chemical engineering at Tsinghua ...”

“... Trinity!10 January. In George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book it’s recorded that Yeats told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (a solitary man’s expression of longing for still greater solitude) sung by a thousand Boy Scouts he set up a rigid censorship to prevent anything like that ever happening ...”

“... that of Leontes, a world as public as a theatre, we don’t need to look for motives; we need only read behaviour.The play begins (as did Cymbeline) with two courtiers talking. But this careful prosy exchange is so exquisite, so utterly mannered, that one of the two, Archidamus, gets stuck and breaks down – an oddity that may make us more sympathetic when ...”

“... in his youth. The partnership has inspired plays and novels, from Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist to Peter Ackroyd’s The House of Dr Dee. Its apotheosis, in this picaresque sense, is the notorious occasion at Trebon Castle in southern Bohemia, when the spirits revealed to Kelley their wish that he and Dee should ‘hold their wives in common’. That Jane Dee ...”

“... and then to the Russian cemetery in the distant suburb of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, where Lang read out a message from Mikhail Baryshnikov and ballerinas filled the grave with pointe shoes. Nureyev had ordered that his tomb, an unusual monument covered with a superb mosaic rug, should be placed at a distance from that of Serge Lifar, but it was still ...”

“... her a diamond pendant from Harry Winston.‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’, which he read at the funeral, was Taylor and Burton’s favourite poem. It starts:How to keep – is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce, latch or catch or key to keepBack beauty, keep ...”

“... and Marco Tardelli’s primal scream (Spain 1982); Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ leap over Peter Shilton (Mexico 1986); Frank Rijkaard’s fleck of gob caught mid-parabola towards Rudi Völler’s perm, and Gazza’s tears, and Maradona’s tears (Italy 1990); Roberto Baggio’s penalty soaring over the bar (USA 1994); Zinedine Zidane walking past the ...”

“... intellectual rainbows curving above them, but have solider rock beneath them. It is difficult to read any of them without a sense of intellectual excitement. Typically composed of a chain of radically unexpected connections across texts often separated by centuries, even millennia, they contain, again and again, arresting discoveries, fruit of that ...”

“... racing. Every day when he got home from work I would go into his bedroom and sit with him while he read out from an evening paper the runners for the following day. Quite often we would all go racing on a Saturday, especially when there was a meeting at Kempton or Hurst Park or Windsor, and this was the one sort of family outing I always wholly ...”