“... to such projects of the last decade as ‘neuroethics’ and ‘neuromarketing’. (The latter took off five years ago, with a study comparing the way Pepsi and Coca-Cola affected the brain’s ‘reward centres’.) Traffic-light colour, most often: in the standard graphics, reds or greens are seen to inflame sundry patches of an isolated, ruckled grey ...”

“... and Auden himself evidently felt he had been knocked about a bit. ‘Desmond MacCarthy took me to task severely,’ he told a young admirer back home in New York: ‘He’s the Grand Old Man of English criticism … now the publishers over there are advertising it as “that controversial volume”.’ Auden had endured controversy anyway since his ...”

“... into a full-blown paranoid belief that the security services were plotting a coup against him. John Major was not far behind. He would leave a cabinet discussion to go and read the latest edition of the Evening Standard in the anteroom, then come back to suggest they begin the discussion again in the light of what the Standard was saying. In his memoirs he ...”

“... and practice, and about the herd instincts of the City of London, as accurate today as when he took over the magazine a century and a half ago. The Memoirs of Walter Bagehot is an oddity, for Bagehot left behind no memoir when his chronically weak chest finally undid him at the age of 51. Instead, Frank Prochaska has stitched together this self-portrait ...”

“... Mike Hart). The system worked. The managers knew what they had and knew what to recommend. They took poetry books from obscure presses (run by poets) as trade. No money changed hands. Three of my titles for one of yours. ‘Manner,’ Ed Dorn says in his extensive jacket-notes to Raworth’s only published novel, A Serial Biography, ‘is what the English ...”

“... note’, in which the dramatist is reported as saying that Christ enjoyed carnal relations with John, the beloved disciple, and that all men who did not love tobacco and boys were fools, Marlowe’s own bias seems unusually clear. Sexual relations between man and man (or man and beast) became a capital offence in England in 1533. Demoted briefly to the ...”

“... in the minding.’ Caring about something is caring that it be as good as it can be. Housman took the kind of care of his chosen (dead) authors – often savaging those who could not do them justice – that he wasn’t ultimately able to take of the man who was the love of his life, Moses Jackson. But the scholarship was not a substitute, or some kind ...”

“... whose disadvantages are not only social or physical but cognitive. The volume Dog Fox Field (1990) took its title from a Nazi test for mental function; the title poem is an angry elegy for the ‘feebleminded’: These were no leaders but they were first into the dark on Dog Fox Field: Anna who rocked her head, and Paul who grew big and yet giggled small, Irma ...”

“... knew how to strongarm a vote and how to hold a grudge. He was a rival to the stylish, charismatic John F. Kennedy, but as his running mate was vital to JFK’s election in 1960; the alliance brought him to power after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. Kennedy’s death more or less ensured that Johnson would be elected the following year, but when he ...”

“... to the church and murdered the lot of them. A thousand years later, in 2008, excavations at St John’s College uncovered 37 sturdy Nordic skeletons, all men aged between 16 and 25. Some English historians suggested that this was a rare instance of Ethelred’s orders being carried out. But the following year, archaeologists excavating the site of the new ...”

“... instructed by persons in higher rank to stand there, hold this leash, look at the camera, and they took pictures for PsyOps. I didn’t really, I mean, want to be in any pictures. I thought it was kind of weird.’ Detainees 27, 30 and 31 were stripped of their clothing, handcuffed together nude, placed on the ground, and forced to lie on each other and ...”

“... X when he ghosted his autobiography? To what extent did Ted Sorensen create the verbal manner of John F. Kennedy when he wrote Profiles in Courage, a book for which the future president won the Pulitzer Prize? And are the science fiction stories H.P. Lovecraft ghosted for Harry Houdini not the best things he ever wrote? There would be a touch of all this in ...”

“... with 64 gigabytes of RAM – and he grabbed the one that wasn’t yet fully encrypted. He also took Ramona’s phone, which wasn’t encrypted either, and headed for the door. They were on the 63rd floor. It occurred to him that the police might be coming up in the elevator, so he went down to the 61st floor, where there were office suites and a swimming ...”

“... also fed up with being mocked and derided, pulled out of the meeting at short notice, leaving John Singer Sargent to attend on his own. The British generals are said to have been horrified when Sargent opened Thayer’s valise. According to Richard Murray of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the prototype garment resembled an old hunting ...”

“... of Mosley’s political career. Fellow politicians, Michael Foot and Richard Crossman among them, took the view that, like themselves, he was interested in power but that, unlike them, unlike Foot and Crossman at any rate, he was too impatient to wait his turn. For Skidelsky, though there are signs that he may now repent it, Mosley was a more heroic figure, a ...”