“... everything from carpentry to glassblowing to calculation. At his wits’ end, he left a poisoned apple on Blackett’s desk. What could have been a nasty incident turned out to be a narrow escape. His father, in town on a visit, worked out a deal with the dean. Instead of being sent down (or sent to prison), Oppenheimer was sent to an analyst. Apparently ...”

“... the mind exiled from Nature is the story of Western Man,’ Hughes wrote in a rollicking review of Max Nicholson’s The Environmental Revolution in 1970: ‘Our Civilisation is an evolutionary error.’ It’s a sorry story of decline, but the temper of Hughes’s poems is rarely elegiac: nature puts up a good fight. It’s not surprising to learn that Hughes ...”

“... trips to a neighbourhood wine store and movie theatre, a $134 haircut, a $765 visit to an Apple store and $4000 for a new floor in his home. More than $5000 for a Rubio family getaway to the luxury Melhana Plantation in Georgia was charged to the credit card of Rubio’s chief of staff, who evidently let himself get swept up in the spending spree. In ...”

“... sat on a bleached-out walkway near London Bridge, staring into a gigantic billboard: ‘Pepsi Max: Max the Taste, Axe the Sugar.’ The concrete walkway sloped down from a modern block of offices labelled Colechurch House. It was the middle of the morning, cold, with hardly anyone around. I sat cross-legged with a torn ...”

“... of being the author of This Side of Paradise and I want to start over,’ he told his editor, Max Perkins, frustrated that his public wanted his writing to be a simple reproduction of his life with Zelda. But it’s impossible to separate Fitzgerald’s life from his literary output: fact and fiction repeatedly inform each other. He told Charles Scribner ...”

“... was bent into new shapes – by Alfred Jarry, Robert Desnos, Pierre Reverdy, Henri Michaux, Max Jacob and others. All of them shared the conviction that poetry no longer held a monopoly on compression, and that narrative could be used for purposes other than telling a story. As George Balanchine said, when told his ballets were too abstract: ‘How much ...”

“... but let me just say that anyone interested in the Emma Eckstein case would do better to read Max Shur’s article that first unearthed the case,1 which discusses some important historical and theoretical questions virtually ignored by Masson, such as the relation of the Emma Eckstein case to the Irma dream of The Interpretation of Dreams and Freud’s ...”

“... per cent of Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest corporation, worth possibly $2 trillion, dwarfing Apple, Google, Amazon or ExxonMobil, and listing it on a foreign stock exchange in the world’s biggest ever IPO: Hong Kong, Singapore and London are among the contenders for the listing. Oil revenue – until recently Aramco’s profits were taxed at 85 per ...”

“... one imagines, by John Bayley, whose efforts on behalf of his late wife and her reputation make Max Clifford seem timid and retiring. One lesson of this deplorable business is never to sanction the shooting of any video, however lofty its purpose, because once shot it will be shown. Professor Hodges seems to have arrived at his diagnosis of Alzheimer’s ...”

“... healthy self-management lapse so swiftly into chaos? Because the serpent will have bitten the apple, say Forsyth and his Scottish Office servants. They mean the serpent of politics. This is also the problem for a growing number of people occupying the intermediate stance in Scotland – those who find themselves somewhere in between the upper and lower ...”

“... Despite this, a militant cast of mind has flourished in media and government circles. In Max Weber’s typology, the sect has become a church – at home with wealth and power and governed by Church Fathers who learned geopolitical casuistry as directors of US intelligence agencies, the neoconservatives’ institutional home.In retrospect, this coup ...”

“... Generally he returned from London well after midnight. He rose after a breakfast in bed of stewed apple, toast melba, tea, a glass of hot water and some pills, and left the house briskly at 8.20. His face was delicately shaved, he selected his overcoat with great care, put one arm in the sleeve, shook the coat up onto his shoulders, inserted the other ...”