“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the passionate hater of Blair and Blairism who has a place in his heart for the Fabians and the white heat of technology; the enthusiast for Portsmouth’s Tricorn Centre (above), demolished in 2004, who dotes on Lutyens; the proud insulter of Islam who loves the multiculturalism of Birmingham; the critic of colonialism who relates the horrors of the Opium ...”

“... doubt that Knox has suffered. But the photo feels somehow unbearably false.In the New York Times, Sam Tanenhaus was dismissive of Knox’s ‘well-orchestrated round of TV appearances’ and pointed out that her ghostwriter had previously collaborated with Socks, ‘the Clintons’ “first cat”’. Then he got on to what really bothered him: Knox’s ...”

“... 22 September. XR has constructed a lightvessel on wheels, about the size of a bus. In large white letters on the red hull: ‘Sound the Alarm. Climate Emergency.’ It makes its stately way along the front from Hove towards the conference centre, with an entourage of noisy activists, many on bicycles, sounding their bells. It’s equipped with an ...”