“... friend of a friend who came in a couple of days a week to open the post and deposit the money, in May 1996. A month later, Omidyar quit his job at General Magic to work on AuctionWeb full-time. In August, Jeff Skoll, another friend of a friend, who had an MBA from Stanford, came on board: Omidyar needed someone to work with him who knew how to put together a ...”

“... programme of the federal government; and a lot of them were listening to their radios in April, May, June and July. But there have also been grounds for fear that were genuine: a fact the prosperous neoliberal consensus lightly brushed off. Non-fanatical Americans of modest means have wondered how their children will pay for the emergency measures we are ...”

“... the end of the Civil War, his father was denounced to the authorities by his best friend) may lie behind this mistrustful disposition. But it is also tempting to see in his aggrieved scepticism something of the straitened epistemological circumstances of contemporary fiction, many of whose practitioners feel as little able to believe in omniscient ...”

“... 70 per cent of what he hoped in his first two years. Jay Gatsby, too, kept lists, and one may be reminded of Gatsby’s ‘Platonic conception of himself’. The unsettling thing about Gatsby was that he proved to have a self-image unalterable by defeat. Since his party was badly beaten in the mid-term election on 2 November, Obama has hinted that he ...”

“... what could be a meter. He says he’s working at a house nearby but needs to check our drain which may have a hairline crack. He makes to come in, but I say that if there is any work needs doing we have a builder of our own and in any case my partner deals with all that. He then claims to have spoken to my ‘boyfriend’ who says it’s OK. I shut the door on ...”

“... for its smog, partly because the air there was sure to be better. When I visited him one rainy May evening during a house-hunting trip – his home was supposedly a steal because it was selling for under half a million dollars – we drank tea at his kitchen table, surrounded by his boxes and furniture and former life, him at the end of something and me at ...”

“... did not. A year after meeting Parry, she was pregnant. They got married in San Francisco on 11 May 1923 and hitchhiked to Carmel for their honeymoon.Back at Berkeley in the autumn, Parry began his MA thesis on the Iliad and the Odyssey. ‘A Comparative Study of Diction as One of the Elements of Style in Early Greek Epic Poetry’ was submitted in ...”

“... field notes to intricate laboratory equipment). All are bound in a skein of relations that we may as well regard as social, except that the social is no longer the proprietary realm of human beings. Crucially, the objects of study themselves must be seen as actors. ANT envisaged interactive networks, in which humans and other creatures – or ...”

“... were a wealth-generating beast, always raring to go, if only we’d let it.Given all this, it may come as a surprise to learn that the analysis of ‘economic growth’ in its contemporary sense is a relatively recent development. Some will say that Adam Smith was the first theorist of economic growth (a term he didn’t use), but even as late as ...”

“... sometime between 1808 and 1812. Like Goya’s better-known images of the Madrid uprising of 2 May 1808 and the bloody retribution that came after, the painting depicts the calamitous violence of the Peninsular War, which followed Napoleon’s invasion of Spain. But while Goya’s intentions are clear in El Dos and El Tres de Mayo, it is much less obvious ...”

“... bent. However, his system has proved rotten at securing for him what he wanted – and may still want – leadership of the Labour Party. What is Bennism now? In many ways, as he keeps insisting, it is the polar opposite of Thatcherism – though, as both volumes of the diaries show, Benn saw many of the same social-cum-political movements at work ...”

“... nuclear threat. ‘Those who would measure the timetable for Saddam’s atomic programme in years may be seriously underestimating that situation and the gravity of the threat,’ he claimed. An article in Time Magazine in December asked ‘How soon will Saddam get the bomb?’ It concluded: ‘Not nearly so soon as the Bush Administration claims.’ Stories ...”

“... can do is to say: try doing it my way; try describing what goes on in my terms; perhaps you may find that I have given you better tools with which to achieve your ends. The philosophers who will most dislike Dennett’s book – those who will be most convinced that he has merely explained consciousness away – are those who believe that some of the ...”

“... and acting one of his favourite roles, as legal adviser. Taylor’s wife (his second) left him in May 1763 and went to live with her sister, complaining – as she was later to do in a Chancery suit – of ‘very personal Ill Usage’, and claiming she feared for her bodily safety in remaining with him. Johnson is absolutely determined not to believe this ...”

“... to another word about Hemingway’s home town Oak Park, a posh suburb of Chicago; and although it may seem a little ungracious to say so, for she was an interesting woman, you may feel some regret that a thousand letters from Hadley to Ernest have survived. Although Reynolds and Griffin (who has two further volumes in ...”