“... surgeons, Ott and Jakobson – desperate measures in 1902, when abdominal surgery was no light matter. The miscarriage seemed a horrible fulfilment of a bad omen at a wild party held in the theatre at the end of January: the actors slid down waxed boards; the actor Kachalov fought a boxing match in drag – pink tricot and high heels; Chaliapin sent ...”

“... hedge funds tends to cluster: in part because those following the same general strategy will often light on the same opportunities (the number of attractive fixed-income price discrepancies, for example, is finite); in part because there is lots of chatter in markets about potentially profitable trades. You might think that if you’d discovered such a trade ...”

“... sculptures shift as you walk around them. They move on the air currents, changing colour with the light. Up close, they reveal the labour of their making: neat stitches leave stray ends of fluttering thread; lighter material (net or voile) is often supported by stiffer material (cheesecloth or burlap) inserted carefully behind it, blending colours and ...”

“... it appears too small, too fussy about content and composition, too ‘European’ (the Minimalist Donald Judd, an admirer of the mature Smith, dissed such prewar Modernism in these terms in 1964, a year before Smith died in an automobile accident at the age of 59). Trained as a painter, Smith began with objects attached to canvases; then he cobbled together ...”

“... Maclean to collect and assess for the Russians information about nuclear weapons co-operation (Donald Maclean was at this time in the British Embassy in Washington). When Kim Philby arrived in Washington in 1949, as the SIS liaison man with American Intelligence, the double-agent ‘Basil’ was able to confirm the suspicions of James Jesus Angleton that ...”

“... and this is because there is in the British literary climate something of that ‘philistinism’ Donald Davie says was characteristic of the Movement: ‘We would not entertain for a moment the idea that poetry could be, in some degree, or from some points of view, a self-justifying activity.’ Why should it be that, insofar as it’s possible to abstract ...”

“... One of Donald Davie’s early poems, and one of his strongest, is ‘Pushkin: A Didactic Poem’, from Brides of Reason (1955). As in Davie’s ‘Dream Forest’, Pushkin is taken as a model, a poet Who recognised no checks Yet brooked them all – a mind Molten and thereby fluent, Unforced, easily strict. In this didactic poem the speaker is professional, drawing his comparisons with rehearsed casualness: In the matter of Pushkin, Emily Brontë Is the best analogy in some ways Among our poets ...”

“... be the oldest known member of the genus Homo, living 1.8 million years ago. And then along comes Donald Johanson, a young American, finding, near Hadar in Ethiopia, a whole set of hominid fossils dating back nearly twice as far, to 3.5 million years. But the work of the two groups has been by no means separate. Johanson’s chief collaborator, Tim White, was ...”

“... is as strange to me as cuneiform. The drifting ritual, and the early training (which is why the light in the hall is on, and the door open, wider) of listening for catastrophe in the night, means that I have always taken an age to get to sleep. Sometimes this tips over into insomnia. Not a chance of drifting. Just the mind growing increasingly frantic with ...”

“... in the US have not been entirely surprised at the fraud and malpractice that has come to light: it was always present, and has changed only in scale. (There was a US sub-prime crisis in the late 1990s, which only specialists seem to remember.† It was much more limited in scale, but it revealed extensive over-optimistic accounting by lenders.) That ...”

“... interdealer screens between eight or ten guys, and this means that prices can move wildly on very light volume.’ Yet because the level of the ABX-HE indices is used by banks’ accountants and auditors to value their multi-billion dollar portfolios of mortgage-backed securities, this esoteric market has considerable effects, since low valuations weaken ...”

“... His activity began to annoy: using the simple materials to hand, particularly available light only, the young man was producing images which didn’t appear to his bosses to be giving a sufficiently glamorous or polished account of the revolutionary masses. His beach scenes were content to let the sky and sea sparkle and the people frolic in ...”

“... Donald Trump​ vowed that the ‘convention in Cleveland will be amazing!’ It will probably be the only campaign promise he ever fulfils, but indeed, as watched on television, it was amazing, unlike any other, if not quite, as he later summed it up, ‘one of the most peaceful, one of the most beautiful, one of the most love-filled conventions in the history of conventions ...”

“... also (and strangely, considering his origins in the neo-Augustan ‘Movement’ of the Fifties) Donald Davie, who kept the subject respectable, the interest alive. Michael Alexander suggests that ‘indifference and bafflement are today more common than hostility,’ and that may be so. But there has been some excellent work done on Pound recently: Richard ...”

“... than most.Not all sculptors who work in stainless steel make such concerted use of the brilliant light effects inherent in its surface. Only David Smith has pursued them as diligently as Ray. The two men share a commitment to contingency as well as a medium: not just steel (itself an alloy of iron), but stainless steel in particular, another alloy, first ...”