“... cousin to the Latin vaticinor (the Vatican is named from its site on the collis vaticanus, which may itself have got its name from the fact that seers and prophets used to congregate there). ‘Fate’ is similarly derived from fatus, the past participle of Latin fari, ‘to speak’. Prophecy is therefore performative, a speech act that does something in ...”

“... Greg Lindsay alone. Kasarda, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s business school, may be a peculiar sort of Johnson, but Lindsay, a business journalist, is nonetheless his committed Boswell. A Boswell who, in search of his subject’s zeitgeist wisdom, once mounted a three-week exploration of ‘Airworld’ – as Kasarda calls it – by ...”

“... defenders of the old faith faced either courageous death or self-disgust, and Wyatt’s explosion may have been political. Equally, trained up for war through the mock-war of jousting and tournament, the young men at court turned easily to private violence. In Holbein’s portrait Richard Southwell has a scar across the neck. The Earl of Surrey was sent to ...”

“... in a series of poems in which the reader finds certain emotions being dissected, emotions she may feel while reading. ‘An Elliptical Stylus’ starts as a painful memory of his dad’s attempt to buy an expensive needle ‘for our ancient, beat-up Philips turntable’, which made the salesman splutter at their pretension: ‘still smirking, he sent us ...”

“... only in the final painting is a door indicated; otherwise, there seems no means of escape. There may be pictures on the wall, but not of the sort that offers any view outwards; darkly unreadable, they return us to the intense clusters of men. Occasionally, a slight relief comes in the form of flowers, or fruit, or a carafe of wine, and there is a red ...”

“... at a New York college who believes he is being framed for sex crimes against his students, may also have encouraged her to get hold of the wrong end of the stick: Lasdun was known to be fascinated by the sex and power dynamics of pupil-teacher relationships, and Nasreen had read the book ‘closely’. But her moments of lucidity became less ...”

“... diagnosis that did nothing to effect a cure’. His sessions with four or five different analysts may not have helped him much, but they certainly generated a number of good poems, such as ‘The psychiatrist’s song’, ‘The psychiatrist speaks’ and ‘The psycho-analyst’; in the last of these the analyst is figured as embodying, like advertising, an ...”

“... of the debates: ‘No props, notes, charts, diagrams or other writings or other tangible things may be brought into the debate by any candidate’; ‘The candidates may not ask each other direct questions, but may ask rhetorical questions’; ‘Except as provided in subparagraph ...”

“... situation – in which unregulated firms exploit a rapidly increasing employment asymmetry – may well be unsustainable. Most workers are reluctant to give up job security for the ‘independence’ afforded by gig work unless they have to – in a slack labour market, for example, where there is a surplus of labour. When there is a labour shortage, the ...”

“... men and women (mainly men, but we’ll come to that) who are building the artificial systems that may one day, perhaps quite soon, be able to perform many tasks that have traditionally been thought to require human intelligence. The prevailing mood of the conference is one of remorselessly practical problem-solving, mixed with occasional bursts of euphoria at ...”

“... All this information is added to the database without the patient’s consent. Although that may seem at odds with a patient’s rights, it is crucial to the data’s value: if you ask for consent not everyone will give it, and, worse, the people who do give consent aren’t typical, so the data no longer tells you what you need to know. The legal and ...”

“... Union at night. The first foreigner to fly on the Maxim Gorky was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on 17 May 1935. Sitting in the cabin, Saint-Exupéry imagined himself on the balcony of a hotel set in the sky. The very next day, the Maxim Gorky collided with another plane during a propaganda flight over Moscow and crashed, killing its 36 passengers and crew, and ...”

“... military have real power over policy-making, even in matters of war. General Tommy Franks may have regarded Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense, as ‘the stupidest fucking guy on the planet’, but he took Feith’s orders, and those of the civilians standing behind him: Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the president himself. Their ...”

“... if the staphylococcus gets into a bone it can be out of antibiotic reach and amputation may be the only remedy.The nature of the anti-staphylococcal immune response explains why there are no successful vaccines. Enthusiasm for them in the 1920s and 1930s was a result of the rhetorical skills of Alexander Fleming’s boss at St Mary’s Hospital, Sir ...”

“... on a map? No doubt financial constraints were the main cause of this information blackout, but it may also have seemed excusable because of our uncertainty about what sort of thing a translation of a poem is: how much, and what, we need to know in order to make sense of it. Translation necessarily cuts poems loose from their origins: it carries them not only ...”