“... main attraction. Under its last two directors, it has begun to collect modern British writers. The price paid by the Huntington for Isherwood has not been divulged. A year ago, the sum floating around in (uninformed) coffee-room gossip was a million dollars. Some newspapers in Britain reported ‘several million dollars’, which seems unlikely: it is not that ...”

“... million people in Britain buying a new novel every week or two’, and points out that for the price currently charged by British publishers for new hardback fiction, a family could rent a video recorder for a month. This is true: but it’s hard to argue that the novel as a form has any inherent edge over film or television, say, when plot and ...”

“... even at this late hour, by the prospect of hordes of foreigners being seduced into the country by Jack Straw. Several ministers, some for lack of any other strategy, some out of an instinctive xenophobia, press the Prime Minister to ‘play the race card’. The hawks on this subject are the two Michaels, Portillo and Howard, whose fathers were both ...”

“... or at least attempted to satisfy, the improper requests.’ One man they tried to satisfy was Jack Warner, who as president of Concacaf (the football association of North and Central America and the Caribbean) was in control of three crucial votes. Warner wanted money to support grassroots football in his home country of Trinidad, which meant cash paid ...”

“... William Cronon wrote in Nature’s Metropolis (1991), ‘one could buy, sell and settle up price differences without ever worrying about whether anything really existed to back up contracts.’Markets in commodities are not just about supply and demand. They are protected by state coercion, whether through the enforcement of contracts or at the point ...”

“... of the Eighties was directors’ ‘share options’: that is, ‘options’ to buy shares at the price obtaining when the options are granted and instantly to sell them again. By this device directors of companies – whose shares go up in value – as has been the case throughout the period in the enormous majority of companies – proceeded to enrich ...”

“... The UK has somehow managed to maintain top-ranked universities for only about a fifth of the US price. The top ten or 20 places typically grab all the attention. What happens when we consider all 200? No summary of the mean rankings of the top 200 universities over the past seven years is available, but we can examine the data in the THE rankings for ...”

“... heard Howl – it was new to me. Allen began in a small and intensely lucid voice. At some point Jack Kerouac began shouting ‘GO’ in cadence as Allen read it. In spite of all our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before – we had gone beyond a point of no return – and we were ready for it, for a point of no return. Ginsberg himself was ...”

“... with powers of speech. Lambert was the co-author, with the famous paranormal investigator Harry Price, of a book on Gef, The Haunting of Cashen’s Gap, which was sceptical about some of the Irvings’ account but didn’t rule out the possibility that Gef was real. Price, who made a media career out of ...”

“... paranoia, from the tiled bore of the Blackwall Tunnel. Nobody crosses water without paying a price, the ferryman’s wages. The peninsula, marshlands giving way to the toxic debris of the South Metropolitan Gas Works, is represented on maps from the Seventies (which now appear positively antiquarian) as a radiant blank. Polar nothingness bordered by ...”

“... with the assumption that liberalism was the common sense of the country from Roosevelt through to Jack Kennedy. Roosevelt got the country out of depression and proved that big government could be good government. From the wartime boom through the Eisenhower years, a liberal consensus fuelled a dramatic extension of American prosperity. Then the rot set ...”

“... side – and even a few deaths at home are likely to be considered by the electorate as too high a price to pay for recklessly putting ideas about a new world community into practice. Even if the war goes as smoothly as Blair hopes, it will almost certainly have divided the Cabinet, split his own party and (for a time, until victory has been achieved) turned ...”

“... Murdoch was happy to co-operate with the NGA as long as they worked in his favour, keeping the price of operating a newspaper so high that it staved off the competition. The meeting continues and I am still undecided. I am at heart a sheep and all I want is one journalist to come up with an honourable reason for taking the money and the first armoured ...”

“... Sheldon Adelson, to expand his gambling empire. Adelson was so grateful for the above-market-price sale that decades later he introduced Son to Donald Trump, and lent him his yacht so that he could go snorkelling with Saudi royals.The same year, Son added the computer publishing house Ziff to his portfolio, at a cost of $2.1 billion. Barber ...”

“... Since I already had an eBay account, I put the CD up for auction on her behalf, with a starting price of £50, a reserve (concealed from prospective buyers) of £750, a brief but enthusiastic blurb (‘EXTREMELY RARE early KEANE CD single’ etc) and an excessive number of high resolution digital photographs of the CD and its packaging. I started the ...”