“... jihadism. In late 2010, Schmidt hired Cohen to head Google Ideas, a ‘think/do tank’ in New York. His career trajectory reflected the new intimacy of Washington and Silicon Valley. Still the question remained: how to put the undisciplined geniuses of the tech world at the service of the sclerotic State Department (and vice versa)? According to Allen and ...”

“... was part-nationalised in 1975 – and several banks have been as good as nationalised this year. Peter Mandelson recently said that the £2.3 billion in loan guarantees he unlocked for the car industry were no ‘bail-out’, being intended to promote its ‘greening’, but this was just a fancy way of getting access to £1.3 billion from the European ...”

“... have appealed much to Leavis either, but they do offer graphic additional proof in support of Peter Ackroyd’s assertion in his 1984 biography of Eliot that ‘when he allowed his sexuality free access, when he was not struggling with his own demons, it was of a heterosexual kind’: When my tall girl sits astraddle on my lap, She with nothing on and I ...”

“... like an evasion, a tricksy manoeuvre by Coetzee to sidestep saying what he ‘really’ believed. Peter Singer, one of Coetzee’s designated respondents, was particularly exasperated: ‘I prefer to keep truth and fiction clearly separate.’ Others saw it as an effective polemical gesture, concisely articulating the proposition that ideas are always an ...”

“... Astor fortune had its origins in the fur trade monopoly that John Jacob Astor established in New York after migrating there from Walldorf in the Rhineland in the late 18th century. The profits went into buying up large tracts of Manhattan when it was still mainly farmland and scrub; later, when the fields grew into streets and buildings, many of them held on ...”

“... attention of Facebook’s first external investor, the now notorious Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Again, The Social Network gets it right: Thiel’s $500,000 investment in 2004 was crucial to the success of the company. But there was a particular reason Facebook caught Thiel’s eye, rooted in a byway of intellectual history. In the course of his ...”

“... before he landed up in Leeds, including playing for Xavier Cugat at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. Cut to 40 years later, when I saw him in the Festival Hall bookshop. I went up to him and stammered out my appreciation of that time in the 1950s, saying how much the orchestra had meant to me then. For someone who’d gone on to become principal bass of ...”

“... of the ‘unmarried mother, condemned to have neither a husband nor a career’. Harman went to York University, which she didn’t enjoy much, and where, just before she sat finals, one of her tutors, T.V. Sathyamurthy, told her if she slept with him he’d make sure she got a 2.1. She turned him down and got a 2.1 anyway, but one of her friends, a girl ...”

“... affair with him in New Mexico, which was interrupted when she and Race picked up and moved to New York. Lucia sold children’s ponchos and lived in the same building as Denise Levertov and was happy – wasn’t she? – until Buddy showed up one night with ‘a bottle of brandy and four tickets to Acapulco’. That is what, in this world, we call a ...”

“... and said that without factor concentrates, quality of life would be ‘much poorer’ for many. Dr Peter Jones, director of Newcastle’s haemophilia centre, complained to the Press Council that the Mail on Sunday’s piece was ‘sensational and highly exaggerated’, and had led to haemophilia centres being ‘inundated with calls from worried ...”

“... without him.The Scottish poet Alastair Reid died almost on the same day as Karl, far away in New York, and in his poem ‘Curiosity’, which is about cats with nine lives, he left some helpful lines about death:A cat-minority of oneis all that can be counted onto tell the truth and what cats have to tellon each return from hellis this: that dying is what ...”

“... such as the US trade representative Robert Lighthizer and Trump’s favourite economic adviser, Peter Navarro, the question is why the effort to enrol China in the world economy was undertaken in the first place, and who benefited from an experiment that has gone so badly wrong.The crude Trumpian take, which is perhaps also the kindest, is that the US ...”

“... a pale strapless gown with flowers all over the bosom. How would she not make anyone nervous? Peter Bradshaw has written that Taylor and Clift ‘are almost like reflections of each other; when they kiss, something incestuous and thrillingly forbidden throbs out of the screen.’ Charlie Chaplin told Stevens it was ‘the greatest film ever made about ...”

“... dollars on private jets, personal loans, luxury condominiums in Colorado, Mexico and New York City – and on the construction of a $12.8 million golf course. On 12 September, Dennis Kozlowski, the former chief of Tyco International – and described by Business Week as ‘perhaps the most aggressive dealmaker in corporate America’ – was put ...”

“... Charles Vaughan, chief of staff of Thiel Capital, owned by the billionaire former Trump supporter Peter Thiel, and Jordan Peterson, who was invited by Orr and other academics to be a visiting fellow at the Cambridge Faculty of Divinity in 2019. After a photo emerged of Peterson with a man wearing a T-shirt with the slogan ‘I’m a proud ...”