“... one with a square black face. James said it wasn’t a fake, his sister had bought it for him on Bond Street. They hadn’t been in contact for ten years, he said, and it was a present to seal their reconciliation. I asked to see the watch, but it wasn’t heavy enough to be the real thing and the word ‘Gucci’ was set off-centre. So what is the story of ...”

“... He bought a plot of land in a well-to-do neighbourhood of Chicago and invited the architect Donald Jaye to design him the ultimate bachelor pad. The scheme was denied planning permission, but the drawings were published in the May 1962 issue of the magazine. The ‘almost cartoonishly modern’ three-storey building, as Preciado describes it, was to ...”

“... I’m told that a similar pattern generally holds for US Treasury bonds, with the prices of the bond futures traded in Aurora leading changes in the prices of the underlying bonds (although sometimes it’s the other way around). Foreign exchange is different. Although Aurora is the world’s main site of currency futures trading, the dominant foreign ...”

“... domini regis. What did they pay Chaucer for? Why was he so useful? Is there any clue to his James Bond activities in his poetry? At any rate it is a pleasure to have a literary subject who appears to have been taken seriously in his own lifetime, to have had a role in the great world. No wonder, then, that Chaucer’s biographers have been so ready to pick ...”

“... The​ most enduring blight left behind by Donald Trump, long after he has smashed things up, will be the pile of books devoted to trying to make sense of him. It will grow after investigative journalists have spent years diving for hidden records, exploring subterranean corporations and foreign partners but never reaching the dark ocean bottom ...”

“... on her way to becoming a breast cancer researcher’; the love story of Shyamala and Donald Harris, a graduate student in economics, ‘while participating in the civil rights movement’ and despite her family’s expectations that she return to India and an arranged marriage; the birth of Kamala and her sister, Maya; the marches they went on ...”

“... on this subject. He charts the decline of fellow saxophonist and one-time band-leader Graham Bond from ‘one of the twenty-third best refrigerator salesmen in the United Kingdom’ to a mutilated body beneath a tube train at Finsbury Park. Even more chilling is the story of outstanding drummer Phil Seamen, who knew quite rationally where the use of ...”

“... with Bistro: they kept the super-senior tranches, sometimes insuring them via AIG or specialist bond insurers. (Adelson and Jacob point out the irony: risks that mortgage experts in the insurers would have charged heavily for or perhaps even declined were insured in packaged form in huge amounts – and quite cheaply – by different departments of the same ...”

“... Writing a BBC Third Programme review of Donald Hall’s Penguin Contemporary American Poetry exactly a month before she killed herself early in 1963, Sylvia Plath praised ‘the inwardness of these images ... the uncanny faculty of melting through the leaves of the wallpaper, through the dark looking-glass, into a world which one can only call surrealist and irrational ...”

“... pamphlets promoting the hatred of any group in the community, and requiring a $350,000 indemnity bond to be posted in advance of any march. The ACLU challenged these measures on behalf of the Nazis, and the Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit declared the ordinances unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds. (In the event, the Skokie march did not take ...”

“... scribal energies have gone into the listing – on stone, on papyrus, on vellum, on Basildon Bond, on A4, on disks, on your Handipad Kwikstik Tear-offs-of historical and institutional and personal particulars: an unresting recital of inventories, requisitions, genealogies, enrolments, specifications, agenda, memoranda, desiderata, with the occasional ...”

“... of lyric poetry even when some of them, as in the case of Charles Simic’s jagged narratives or Donald Davie’s complaints, refuse the lyric. In her Introduction to Soul Says, she celebrates the lyric as a kind of charmed quarantine. It is a place where ‘the details associated with a socially specified self’ are stripped away. The ‘all-purpose ...”

“... chat shows and Sunday papers. Her canny male poet counterparts, such as Larkin, or Amis, or Donald Davie, had gone on to enjoy lucrative careers – making money out of academic jobs or film deals as well as writing poetry. They were celebrities of a kind. Sylvia Plath became a celebrity, and has remained one. Elizabeth Jennings, like her ...”

“... people scattered across Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania had changed their minds about Donald Trump before 8 November 2016, and cast their votes instead for Hillary Clinton, this small London-based political consultancy would not now be the subject of breathless headlines and Downing Street statements. Cambridge Analytica could have ...”

“... to a concept of action with an unusually wide scope – wider, for example, than the scope of Donald Davidson’s concept, which is the concept of intentional action. Davidson’s idea is that, if we take the class of physical actions, subtract from it all actions that have purely external causes and are, therefore, passive, and then subtract reflexes and ...”