“... one had ever paid so much money for a social media company before.Musk’s authorised biographer, Walter Isaacson, couldn’t make sense of it – ‘I thought it was insane,’ he told the Financial Times – and Musk’s friends and family didn’t understand it either. Wasn’t Musk supposed to be busy getting humans to Mars by 2025? Kimbal Musk told his ...”

“... Cuneiform studies have come far since 1872, when George Smith, assistant keeper in the Oriental Department of the British Museum, engrossed the December meeting of the Society of Biblical Archaeology with a paper on ‘The Chaldean Account of the Deluge’. Among the tablets recovered from Assurbanipal’s library at Nineveh he had found an account of a world-wide flood which resembled the narrative of Genesis not only in its main outline but even in detail ...”

“... lacking its nuclear pit was accidentally released from another B-47 and landed in the backyard of Walter Gregg’s family home in Mars Bluff, South Carolina. Its high-explosive casing detonated, digging a 35-foot crater, destroying the family Chevrolet, killing six chickens and deeply embarrassing the Pentagon, which had led the American public to believe ...”

“... for a while longer, a wish shared by many ‘wise men’ of the West, from Alexandre Kojève to George Kennan, who preferred a world of bounded empires to one of nation-states. But by war’s end no one was in a position to gainsay the broad shape of the Pax Americana. Perry Anderson, in American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers, his first sustained critique ...”

“... periodical, the New Age, and to meet Scottish intellectuals including the composer Francis George Scott (to whom Hugh MacDiarmid would dedicate A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle) and a French lecturer at Glasgow University called Denis Saurat (who is often credited with giving the 1920s Scottish literary renaissance its name). Most important, ‘in the ...”

“... But FoE’s caution did not destroy its appeal. One great favourite with the press at the time was Walter Patterson, a Canadian-born eco-writer with a degree in nuclear physics, and the capacity to puncture, with a three-sentence letter to a newspaper, or a paragraph of asides in a book, the empty claims of many nuclear industry spokesmen (see, for ...”

“... period of role-reversal designed to make the system more tolerable to the majority. Long before Walter Bagehot, the Venetians had realised the importance of the separation between the ‘dignified’ and the ‘efficient’ parts of the political system, and the doge, that ‘sacred central symbol’ which the Florentines lacked, performed the function of ...”

“... injustice was accompanied by a pious fantasy of purity, of a language being violated. It was Walter Benjamin, in 1931, who wrote what is in many ways still the most revealing essay on Kraus and his ‘struggle against the empty phrase, which is the linguistic expression of the despotism with which, in journalism, topicality sets up its dominion over ...”

“... thinking which found ultimate expression in Aristotle and Plato. It would be ridiculous to say George Thomson’s ideas are refuted, or even contested, by such an argument (and he is unmentioned in the book’s bibliography). But the turn of thought is characteristic of An Unfinished History. Its writer emerges from his thickets of trivia only to muse like ...”

“... formaldehyde. But the career started in shoes. Warhol caused a bit of bother at college with some George Grosz-like drawings of little boys with their fingers stuck up their noses. Grosz’s notion of Dada – ‘the organised use of insanity to express contempt for a bankrupt world’ – was evidently Warhol’s for a minute or two, but the American boy was ...”

“... made up the ‘Hanover connection’: Sigmar Gabriel, former minister of the economy, and Frank-Walter Steinmeier, once Schröder’s chief of staff and now Germany’s president. Steinmeier has been fiercely criticised by Ukraine’s media-savvy ambassador to Berlin, Andriy Melnyk, who accuses him of cosying up to Putin just like his former boss. On 12 ...”

“... including John Barth, William Gass, John Hawkes, Stanley Elkin, William Gaddis, Robert Coover, Walter Abish and Kurt Vonnegut. Sontag was the only woman writer invited, Pynchon the only writer not to turn up. Vonnegut’s wife, the photographer Jill Krementz, recorded the event for posterity. On the other hand, the final words of ‘January’, the last of ...”

“... with which Webster opens her book could as easily have been plucked from wartime discourse. Walter White, the leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, claimed that African Americans tended to be well received in Britain, which he attributed to the fact that ‘black GIs, unlike their white compatriots, did not consider ...”

“... is the description of the ancient Scottish seat of the Roman Catholic earls of Glenallan in Walter Scott’s The Antiquary. The late Countess, ‘partly from a haughty contempt of the times in which she lived, partly from her sense of family pride’, had not permitted the interiors to be modernised. The ‘valuable collection of pictures’, which hung ...”

“... with a group of US fiction writers around his age that includes the late David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides. There are a few things that set Antrim apart: he’s Southern; his strongest affinity to a writer in the previous generation is to Donald Barthelme, not Don DeLillo; he’s the least likely to be ...”