“... 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 ...”

“... of looks and talent: as though she’d decided to abandon the American dream and reverted to being white trash.In the mid-2000s the celebrity gossip machine was hitting peak efficiency, with a clutch of new weekly magazines followed by digital arrivistes such as TMZ, a rolling news website fed by a network of LA tipsters, and bloggers like Perez Hilton, a ...”

“... sculptures Newman would go on to make. The first one, Here I (also 1950), was made up of two thin white verticals in wood, eight feet tall, one finished in rough plaster, the other in smooth paint, set on plaster mounds on top of a wooden milk crate.Where The Wild stretched painting to its vertical limit, Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1951) did the same with its ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... so much so that R. doesn’t even see the queen, though she’s distinctive enough, dressed in white and glittering with jewels, determinedly animated and smiling, which, since she’s been at it for two hours already, is an achievement in itself. We go on through the rooms, talking to all sorts of people – Jim Naughtie, Nigel Slater and David Hare, who ...”

“... Lee hadn’t interested anyone in making, which continued with Bryan Singer’s X-Men (2000) and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002). Lee’s lawsuit got him a pay-out in 2005, reputedly of $10 million, but his outgoings were huge, and the settlement meant he had no stake in the endless cycles of Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) pictures that went on to suck all ...”

“... lot, incognito or on the Onassis yacht. She invested her money wisely. She bought some paintings. Sam Green, the art dealer recruited in 1970 to act as the New York minder of the world’s most over-exposed recluse, amassed hundreds of hours of telephone recordings. Gottlieb quotes a passage from the tapes to demonstrate how unrevealing they are. (I believe ...”