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“... is the concept of probability, a mathematical tool which is remarkable not least because, as Ian Hacking has shown, it was developed remarkably late in the history of Western thought. There is no hint of probabilistic reasoning in classical Greek thought, and even in the 16th century the Italian mathematician Girolamo Cardano could claim that when a dice ...”

“... Mind of Watts’, where, as against the ‘basic realities’, the ‘bitter realities’, of the black ghetto, Pynchon describes white Los Angeles as ‘that creepy world full of pre-cardiac Mustang drivers who scream insults at one another only when the windows are up; of large corporations where Nice-guyship is the standing order regardless of whose ...”

“... Her Friends, in which she observed that her subject would always be an outsider. Twenty years ago Ian Hamilton wrote that Mew’s reputation ‘hangs by a thread’. Her Collected Poems and Prose has long been out of print and there are no critical books devoted to her writing.I’m not sure she would have minded. Reading essays that seek to rehabilitate or ...”

“... to burnish his culture wars résumé. Also disgraceful was the disenfranchisement of Florida’s black electorate on his watch. Florida election officials, ostensibly looking to prevent felons from casting ballots, worked from lists riddled with errors and mistaken entries, with the result that more than 12,000 qualified ...”

“... and little magazines – Divers Press (with Ann), Origin (with Corman), and then (with Olson) Black Mountain Review, named for Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where Olson became rector and in 1954 brought Creeley to teach. Creeley, Olson and Corman would soon see themselves, with some justice, as part of a ...”

“... taming it. This gives it a special political utility. ‘Probability cannot dictate values,’ Ian Hacking wrote in The Taming of Chance (1990), ‘but it now lies at the basis of all reasonable choices made by officials. No public decision, no risk analysis, no environmental impact, no military strategy can be conducted without decision theory couched in ...”

“... Media and Sport Select Committee. Two Conservative peers gave glowing character references: Baron Black of Brentwood, a former director of the Press Complaints Commission, for Stuart Kuttner, managing editor at the News of the World, and Baroness Warsi, a minister of state in the Foreign Office, for Coulson. The influence of News International had helped ...”

“... of its submission a Syndic of the Press, and Watson was very rude to me, the publisher Michael Black preferred not to submit a proposal to the Syndicate. I hope and believe this is not true, and that Black, a serious Leavisian with whom I was quite genially associated for a good many years, knew me well enough to ...”

“... me that she is one of the saints who multiplied in reliquaries after their death, to produce, as Ian Paisley’s website reminds us (in an essay called ‘The Errors of Rome’), the many prepuces of the infant Jesus, and the variously coloured hair of His madly trichogenous mother. Perhaps, in these days of cloning, or in future days of cloning, we will ...”

“... came to be embellished by ‘a crop of country houses … largely on new sites’. This was not, Ian Nairn insisted, ‘at all typical of the pattern in the rest of England’. You can, to quote his near double Tony Hancock, say that again, Mush.Fifty years after Harris and a few years after the heyday of the Arts and Crafts movement, the battle of the ...”

“... at his story of how, on assignment in Jamaica covering Prime Minister Eden’s convalescence at Ian Fleming’s Goldeneye (‘I knew the house because my eldest brother Shane’s widow was now married to Fleming’), he resolved to prevent a fellow correspondent making the disastrous mistake of marrying their hotel’s ...”

“... have grown up with the Waugh industry will find no major surprises: it is the familiar tale with black sauce. The editor’s warning that the letters should be read for entertainment not truth is perhaps superfluous. In this feast of irresponsibility she is ready to puncture with a neat footnote the more wounding nonsenses. She cannot let Mitford get away ...”

“... that women offenders are not ‘truly’ or ‘normally’ female. Take Myra Hindley. When she and Ian Brady were standing trial for the murder of three children, she was widely regarded as having been under the spell of Brady’s ‘magnetic’ personality. Shortly after their conviction, however, it became clear that Brady was seriously mentally ill. News of ...”

“... is also difficult for a League man to be swept along by the acclaim for Jonah Lomu, the giant All Black wing who cut a swathe through England with the certainty of a combine harvester. He has a commanding physical presence and speed to burn, but he may not be quite such a phenomenon in an arena where players’ livelihoods depend on halting him in his ...”

“... home town): And one of them put his blade into the earth To lift a few clods of dirt, the black marl of Miami, And scattered the dirt, and spat, Turning away abruptly, out of respect. Justice was not prolific; like Elizabeth Bishop, with whom he has much in common, he devoted his life to the perfection of a small body of deceptively modest poems. His ...”