“... to whomever was around or just people-watch. In this millennium, in cafés frequented by young white people, every customer seems to be silently staring at an Apple product, so that the places look and feel like offices. Even this phase may be on the way out. The next phase – of trying to keep customers from sticking around – has arrived. A food ...”

“... Eastwood’s relations with his orang-utang co-star; and his excursions into biography, Bird and White Hunter, Black Heart, are brave if lumbering. But what makes and keeps him a star, as actor and director, is a certain intimacy with screen violence, or with ways of representing violence. His Westerns and his cop movies are what continue to matter, and they ...”

“... giving it the deceptive look of a long poem. The success of this approach, loyally managed by Sam Taylor in his translation, is to make Charlotte read as a series of ticker-tape bulletins, delivered in breathless fits and starts. At the entrance to L’Ermitage, something holds Charlotte back: It is a force behind her. She almost has the impression that ...”

“... pawed hop frog snack play. Come ploughed, she             jumps, ground. Bark tractor, white bitterhead grub and pull scarecrow.                   Me! assents his urine. Based on a tribal oral form, ‘The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle’ (1977) is a perfect vehicle for Murray’s zoological, loco-descriptive and narrative ...”

“... downstairs, now comes up and at the sight of a third party he takes fright, retreating to a white van waiting opposite with its engine running which drives off so quickly I fail to get the number. Thinking about it afterwards, where he went wrong was in not being ingratiating enough or trying to explain what the ‘drain problem’ was and graduating ...”

“... wearing elements of a bullfighter costume (red velvet jacket and a black montera hat) along with a white football shirt, yellow socks and black loafers, is confronted by a group of toreros wielding English-branded banderillas – barbed sticks wrapped in the colours of the St George’s Cross. Soon three or four banderillas are hanging from Sterling’s ...”

“... sectors such as medicine, software development, accounting – the list is long. Sam Altman of OpenAI has called for a ‘change to the social contract’. Larry Ellison of Oracle has touted a more sinister use of AI: ‘Citizens will be on their best behaviour because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on ...”

“... human minds. Even as DeepMind’s Hassabis (the company has been owned by Google since 2014) and Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, talk up the imminent arrival of AGI, their concerns about the inherent desires of a human-plus level artificial intelligence and its autonomy surface more rarely. They talk less about what AGI will want and more about what it will ...”

“... symposium ‘on the Negro’. (Symposia on the Negro were popular in the 1960s, helping to keep white liberal panellists occupied and furrowed until the ferocious later phase of Black Power made them all squirm.) Kazin had been unable to attend the symposium itself but, never one to miss a party, popped into the reception being thrown by Commentary’s ...”

“... nostrils of a Quentin Blake drawing, smiles and cigarillos in a well-defended study, a thatch of white hair. ‘New Updike,’ he might think, with a little uptick of a tricky heart, as he came across a trifling piece in the New Yorker, a meatier story in Playboy, a new novel every few years, all backgrounded by the same infusions of radio and television and ...”

“... ancient world. Long before Winckelmann founded the cult of noble simplicity and the still, white statue, still longer before Nietzsche rediscovered Dionysus, the Italian scholar-poet had realised that Classical art was not always calm. The power of Poliziano’s verbal images, and the discovery of Classical forms that seemed to embody them, transformed ...”

“... courtyard. The entrance lobby’s cool, airy silence was a contrast to the intense heat and white light of the afternoon outside. I took the lift up and was let into the office, where I was shown into an empty room with a desk. I spoke with the first of the people who had been asked to come for interview. As with every compliance audit, on my list of ...”

“... prices). But I was at the semi-final a few weeks earlier to see Wimbledon beat Luton Town 2-1 at White Hart Lane, and that was the most fun I have ever had at a football match: a raucous, hilarious, ecstatic confrontation between two overachieving sides whose supporters could barely fill Tottenham’s ground between them. When Wimbledon went on to win the ...”

“... famous actors by their Yiddish birth names (Emanuel Goldenberg, Jules Garfinkle, Bernie Schwartz, Sam Klausman etc) as if this is prima facie proof of treason. HUAC member Representative John Rankin curses them on the House floor as ‘Communist kikes’. After two years pounding the back lots and working the studio corridors, at the age of 29 Clancy drove ...”

“... wheels bolted to planks – the first skateboarders. There are girls and boys, black and white, from the city’s poorest neighbourhood, and they outnumber the spectating parents in the photograph by 13 to one. The boy whose father takes him swimming, the girl whose mother takes her to the theatre, children whose parents ‘do things’ with them ...”