“... genius of Dickens, could not have become himself in the poems without it. As with Dickens (David Copperfield, Pip, ‘George Silverman’s Explanation’) the detail in the writing has a strong diagnostic slant. Dickens’s heroes, like Lowell, are seeking to explain their present selves: but with the important difference that such explanation for ...”

“... so far, so good – ‘while ensuring that it is not abused to conduct politics by another means or to create needless delays.’ Oh. Who is to decide which delays are needless, and what exactly does ‘conduct politics by another means’ imply? Naturally, once the election was won, there had to be some sort of task ...”

“... as in her photographs, she is almost brutally direct, but it’s never entirely clear what she means to say. The first work of hers to get serious attention was a collection of twenty magazine pieces, Slouching towards Bethlehem (1968), which said enough about 1960s America to plant an anxious seed of worry in the heart of a generation. It was followed by ...”

“... publication, he was nominated for election as an associate of the Linnean Society. According to David Attenborough, Lear is ‘the finest bird artist there ever was’. His drawings were primarily intended to help scientists identify species, yet his birds are exhibitionists as well as exhibits, always more than an instance that confirms a rule. The same ...”

“... in 1998, of an earlier form of electronic money, eCash, developed by the computer scientist David Chaum. When Chaum’s firm, which ran the system in a centralised fashion, went bankrupt, it took eCash down with it. With bitcoin, there is no central computer, and therefore no single point of failure, but there isn’t a central record ...”

“... the vampire’s kiss and says: ‘Another two of those wounds would do it.’ Finish me off, she means. She is real but I accept her words are not. A hallucination has to be gross before I can pick it out. My internal monologue is performed by many people – nurses and bank managers to the fore. There is a breathless void inside me, and it needs to be ...”

“... responsible for Julian’s fondness for country squirely pursuits. There’s a good description by David Garnett of Julian beagling at Cambridge: he was ‘far bigger, noisier and more raggedly dressed than any of his companions … bursting with happy excitement … Late in the afternoon Julian turned up with his ragged clothes torn to tatters, which flapped ...”

“... an Improvisation’, where he touches on his concept of mobile form (‘improvisation for me means the forcible insertion into the music of a free dimension’) and discusses new techniques of instrumentation; and ‘Sonate, que me veuxtu?’, in which he expounds a musical poetics derived conjointly from Mallarmé’s late experimentations with the idea ...”

“... Similar approaches have been tried in the US, where it’s called ‘transparent journalism’; David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post got crucial reader intelligence when – over social media – he broadcast gaps in his investigation into Donald Trump’s charities and got some of them filled in. This use of social media by journalists to appeal to the ...”

“... period of declining real incomes in recorded economic history. ‘Recorded economic history’ means as far back as current techniques can reach, which is back to the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Worse than the decades that followed the Napoleonic Wars, worse than the crises that followed them, worse than the financial crises that inspired Marx, worse than ...”

“... most fully developed the argument that the labour time embodied in commodities, including whatever means of production go into furnishing them, ultimately determines their value; and prices, when they don’t coincide with values, at least oscillate around them. For the marginalists, value was a function of marginal utility. In the famous example, diamonds ...”

“... subsidy. The company trying to raise money for the Metropolitan was on the verge of collapse. David Wire, the lord mayor, allowed himself to be persuaded by Pearson – then the Corporation of the City of London’s solicitor – of the case for public transport in the capital, the one that’s still being made today. Wire accepted that something needed ...”

“... dollar fines. Almost no bank will now go anywhere near someone who might be on the list. This means, for instance, that although OFAC has issued ‘special licences’ permitting aid organisations to transfer money into Afghanistan to help feed the millions on the brink of starvation there, in practice it’s next to impossible to do so, because the US ...”

“... has a nice line in dry understatement, and knows this is the understatement of the decade. What he means is that he and his fellow-toilers in the biographical olive grove have been racing to make sense of the great heap of myth, obfuscation, blarney and coded revelation dumped on them in Olivier’s Confessions of an Actor. Far from settling questions about ...”

“... opponent was saying exhibited the profound conviction of his own beliefs. Did not the poet King David say: ‘Let them be ashamed and confounded that seek after my soul: let them be turned backward and put to confusion, that desire my hurt’? Individualism, bordering on eccentricity, even to the extent of ‘cutting off your nose to spite your face’, has ...”