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“... a geode that split open to reveal a crystalline Virgin and Child, and an object resembling a hairy man – ‘some say a hermit, others think John the Baptist.’Kircher’s contemporaries puzzled over fossilised animals and their distribution. The Walloon mathematician René-François de Sluse wrote to the Royal Society in London enclosing a sketch of stones ...”

“... charismatic and ultra-violent lesbian freelance who, the first time we meet her, is wearing Ray-Bans, a white leather jacket and white jeans. Rumour has it that she started as a debt collector and liked the buzz so much that she progressed to providing ‘drugs for government ministries … call girls for officials … information about ex-French ...”

“... wanting to be the thing they know themselves to be: a philosopher king. A spectacular example is Ray Dalio, whose story is excellently told in The Fund by Rob Copeland, a reporter at the New York Times who was formerly the hedge fund beat reporter at the Wall Street Journal.Dalio is the founder and principal owner of Bridgewater, the world’s biggest hedge ...”

“... 1957, when Little Richard returned to the church and left his band, the Upsetters, without a front man, Redding – who had been winning amateur talent shows around Macon – was tapped to fill in for a while. By the summer of 1958, he had dropped out of school, teamed up with a local guitarist named Johnny Jenkins, and joined a group called Pat T. Cake and ...”

“... jet passengers at Osaka’s international airport. The cases were too big for the regular X-ray machines, and the airport staff, no doubt exhausted from a long day processing holiday travellers, waved the men and their cargo through. Out on the tarmac, a ground crew worker noticed that one of the cases seemed heavier than it had when he unloaded it that ...”

“... words a day on an endless book on government deficit spending, and later, on stories of a ‘hell ray’ death machine. Stafford’s two older sisters were conventional girls who enjoyed growing up in Boulder, Colorado, both a stronghold of Ku Klux Klan and the site of a tubercular colony. She detested her mother’s genteel housewifeliness and for a while ...”

“... over the past thirty years or so. Hassan’s inheritance was lucky. Muhammad V, his father and a man who seems to have possessed the vital, intangible quality of presence, was twice made a hero by the actions of the French Protectorate authorities who had occupied the country since 1912: first, when, in 1930, he refused to sign a notorious law which would ...”

“... out with anti-listening armour, decoy-signal devices and advanced encryption-ware. From his one-man fortress, he leads the hero to turn the tables on the agency and to expose one of its larger malignant operations. Michael Hayden, who became the director of the NSA in 1999, saw the movie and told his workers they had an image problem: the agency had to ...”

“... in here and they caught a Turk and slung his body down the slope.’ It is beautiful. There is a ray of sunshine now and the beeches, which grow almost exclusively on the colder north-facing slopes, are green, gold and russet. The bracken is yellow and copper in the clearings. Huge thirty-metre pines intermingle with the beeches. There is a spectacular stand ...”

“... or to lose custody of their children. The Rorschach promised a short cut to the psyche, an ‘X-ray of the soul’. People might be mysteries unto themselves, but anyone can be figured out. Hermann Rorschach was a Swiss psychiatrist who started creating personality tests when he was bored during the First World War. In a gorgeous sanatorium by Lake ...”

“... and stayed there, and are still daisy-fresh more than a century later. ‘From his neck down a man is worth a couple of dollars a day,’ he once said. ‘From his neck up, he is worth anything his brain can produce.’ He remarked of his friend Henry Ford: ‘This fellow Ford is like a postagestamp. He sticks to one thing until he gets there.’ He had a ...”

“... movement. His reputation for slugging women on the screen needs to be compared with Dietrich’s man-eating act: in both cases, there is an innate tenderness and a real sexual inquisitiveness that makes the action ambiguous. Cagney is charged with restlessness, and yet he always contrives to discharge the agitation daintily or with conscious style. Watch him ...”

“... that the strike, far from representing an upsurge of working-class militancy, was ‘all about one man’ (as the Queen said to Routledge when visiting the Times) is nonetheless to be surprised, both by the apostasy of a man whose views I had assumed to be rigid, and by its tardiness. Scargill was the only child of an ...”

“... urkas’ – the criminal classes – drive the plot. First up comes Xan Meo (intelligentsia), a Ray Winstone-like middle-aged actor who plays cockney wideboys in British gangster flicks. Xan – who shares his surname with Duane Meo, John Self’s ‘whizzkid editor’ in Money – is sardonically described as a ‘Renaissance ...”

“... mother?’ Emma: ‘What if someone accidentally encouraged her friend to fall in love with the man she didn’t know she loved herself?’ Science fiction generally deals in larger ‘what ifs?’ about the underlying rules that structure the world. These can be experiments in wish fulfilment: ‘What if we could live on other planets?’ Or they can be ...”