“... other than English. Many came from America’s upper echelons: Mellon, Vanderbilt, du Pont, Morgan and other robber baron families. Some, to the dismay of J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, were trade unionists, socialists, Jews and veterans of the Lincoln Brigade. When Hoover complained that three COI employees were communists, Donovan said: ‘That’s why I ...”

“... to write directly about paintings if they do not care about them too much. Nothing in the mass of John Koethe’s verse and philosophical prose, for instance, suggests that paintings haunted him continually in anything like the way they did Herbert. (If I do him an injustice, I apologise.) But this seems to have meant that when he spent an hour or two with ...”

“... with Eisenhower’s private life, and which was associated with his wartime driver, Kate Summersby Morgan, does not seem likely to persist, and was only a rumour. Frank Saunders, the driver who worked for President Kennedy’s parents, proceeds by innuendo rather than by rumour. The President, he tells us, did not like to sleep alone and when no one else was ...”

“... magazine Alpha publishes estimates of top individual earnings. The 2007 list was headed by John Paulson of Paulson & Co., who earned $3.7 billion by betting that the value of securities backed by US sub-prime mortgages would collapse. He was followed by George Soros ($2.9 billion) and James Simons ($2.8 billion). These are figures far beyond even the ...”

“... at you now is like/seeing a god or a king/naked and starving in a field,’ the poet Rebecca Morgan Frank wrote in ‘Monk Automaton, c.1560’ (2021), an ode to the machine. But clothed and activated the monk becomes uncanny, even whimsical. When placed on a table it traces the path of a seven-pointed shape. With its head turning left to right, and its ...”

“... Assets Holdings, another blockchain company, is run by Blythe Masters, the English former J.P. Morgan executive who did more than anybody else to pioneer the credit default swap, the dazzlingly ingenious new financial instrument which was a huge success until it nearly destroyed the global financial system.7 This is just a tiny sample, and there are many ...”

“... blue and white Victorian tile at Gabor Cossa which one of the partners thinks is William de Morgan but isn’t and then cross the road to the Fitzwilliam. I take in a chance selection of pictures, dictated by which happen to be in range of available banquettes, and in particular the Van Dyck portrait of Archbishop Laud. It’s hung beside one of his ...”

“... rather Buñuelesque) by Duff C. and Lady W. being so middle-aged and ultra respectable. John Julius Norwich puts his father’s sexual success down to his ability to write bad sonnets to his lady-friends but one wonders if it was a more basic attraction. The moustache is hardly a plus, the photograph on the book jacket making him look like a 1940s ...”

“... the murderer of a great and courageous feminist poet. In 1972 the American poet and activist Robin Morgan published Monster, a book that included a piece in which a gang of Plath aficionados are imagined castrating Hughes, stuffing his penis into his mouth and then blowing out his brains. In Britain a militant anti-Hughes faction took to chiselling his name ...”

“... up on a visit home the previous year, when as research for his play he invited the Black farmhands Morgan and Randall to drink raw milk with him (they very sensibly refused). He isn’t going to die after all, although he will be subject to frequent relapses. ‘When you get well,’ his mother tells him, ‘I think it would be nice if you wrote a book about ...”

“... on its behalf, as well as well-connected political insiders: Reagan’s national security adviser John Poindexter, the Clinton strategist James Carville and, later, the disgraced general Mike Flynn, who was Trump’s first national security adviser. Former US government and intelligence officials were hired to fill executive and advisory roles. In 2009, the ...”

“... On parade (on King’s Parade in fact) just after ten, where the calming presence of Richard Lloyd Morgan, the chaplain of King’s, waits to shepherd me to the Senior Common Room. It’s already crowded with dons, some, since it’s the university sermon, presumably heads of houses.* I manage to avoid a chat by settling into a corner to con my already much ...”

“... themselves. On learning of BB’s descent on Widener’s optimistically attributed collection J.P. Morgan gloated: ‘I hear Berenson’s gone to Philadelphia to bust up Widener’s collection.’ And to promote their services, the Berensons had to suppress their refined nausea at plutocratic vulgarity. At one house they sat through a concert of organ-grinders ...”

“... of sincerity, faith and individual freedom. In a poem called ‘An Alphabet of Goddesses’, Edwin Morgan invoked her in a bleak and powerful litany to Lethe, in which he chants the names of women in history who have been treated badly. He observed no hierarchy: sibyls, anonymous prisoners, celebrated writers each take their place, side by side, and Joan is ...”

“... he was taking part. His critics were more confident; they set him in the company of Middleton, Morgan, Tindal and Bolingbroke – Hume and Voltaire are also prominent, but the assault on Gibbon as an ‘English Voltaire’ responsible for the French Revolution necessarily belongs to the 1790s more than the 1770s – and to this mainly English coterie they ...”