“... programmers. The first chess-playing program was written on slips of paper by Alan Turing and David Champernowne in the late 1940s. At the time, it was easy to think that a computer capable of playing a decent game would require a kind of general reasoning capacity, that it might need to make logical deductions, think strategically and learn abstract ...”

“... most famous greyhound this century’, who has been so encased since 1938. Mick was a great winner, the people’s favourite, a dog who carried his day like no other and like no other could today. There have been faster dogs since, souped-up dynamos with better track records, but this dog alone stands for the time, long vanished, when greyhounds could ...”

“... during the period of suspense that ends just before the grand dinner at Stationers’ Hall; the winner gets an extra bonus of more sales; and the sponsors presumably do at least as well out of the enterprise as they would by spending the same amount of cash on cricket or golf. Although Booker has a financial stake in some best-selling writers, their ...”

“... right, but he was lying with such charm, verve and enthusiasm that he looked and sounded like a winner. The case seemed lost. The dramatic story of how Aitken was finally defeated by his own lies is superbly set out in the final chapters of this book. The truth came out not by due process of law, but thanks to a mixture of journalistic diligence and sheer ...”

“... Not many​ people born in 1929 are still productive, but Dominique Fernandez, winner of the 1982 Goncourt Prize for the novel Dans la main de l’ange, turned 95 a little before his new memoir, Les Trois Femmes de ma vie, appeared – the three women are his grandmother, mother and wife. It wasn’t even the first book he published last year, but followed the novel Un jeune homme simple ...”

“... two otherwise evenly matched teams, when the home side will usually be the one pressing for a winner. Moskowitz and Wertheim say that’s because the referee is allowing it to happen: what we think is a quality belonging to the players is actually a quality we have misattributed to them because of the indulgence of the officials. But that’s not really ...”

“... in the public mind the man who ‘lost everything save honour’. Blair, by contrast, is the winner who seems unable to do anything to reclaim his honour. The risk Blair took in going to war in Iraq was not that he would lose, but that he would win too little for what he had been willing to stake, and end up looking like a fool. This now appears to be ...”

“... game.) They have better players than we do; but it is possible that we are a better team. David Beckham has flown his hairdresser out to Japan, allegedly because Victoria noticed that his mohican was looking scraggly. (As opposed, of course, to completely twuntish.) There is a theory that he is going to try out a whole new hairstyle for the Brazil ...”

“... to recover from its association with a dominant imperialism, and not just in Latin America. David Stoll is another talented US academic, from a younger generation, specialising in Central America, and with a particular interest in Guatemala, about which he has written a couple of interesting, and indeed path-breaking books. Is Latin America Turning ...”

“... two preoccupations – immigration and Europe – would finally start to converge. When it fell to David Cameron to try to get a grip on the slippery European question, he resorted to the time-honoured tactic of promising to get tough at the negotiating table. In 2011, he announced in Brussels that he would veto any new treaty for the Eurozone – at that ...”

“... outstripped anyone’s claim to possess their own story. Here he is writing to his oldest friend, David Peltz, who is thinly fictionalised as Woody Selbst in the story ‘A Silver Dish’ and as George Swiebel in Humboldt’s Gift. ‘What matters,’ Bellow wrote to Peltz when he complained of being used, is that good things get written … We’ve known ...”

“... tough keeping track of all the debutantes promenading into print and creating a stir: Donna Tartt, David Leavitt, Mary Gaitskill, Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Nancy Lemann, Susan Minot, Mary Robison, Anderson Ferrell – a cast of dozens. Many of those rookies trained at the literary dojo of the author, editor, creative writing teacher and guru-mentor-mindgamer ...”

“... simpler theories on other grounds, and conjecture that they are true – and we may be wrong. As David Miller puts it in his interesting, if brisk article in the festschrift, Popper’s view that ‘reality, though unknown, is in some respects similar to what science tells us’ is ‘a consequence of what science tells us, not an assumption science has to ...”

“... T.E. Lawrence was one of history’s winners and one of its great losers. He was a winner in terms of the mythology that surrounded his reputation both in his own day and afterwards, as reflected in the 1962 David Lean biopic, presenting him as the romantic hero – tall, blue-eyed, in flowing robes – he always wanted to be ...”

“... he might be tempted to make such a barely thinkable journey, it was now. He was 31, famous for the David and the Pietà, but his dealings with the pope were deadlocked. If Europe’s ultimate patron was being difficult, perhaps a more obliging one could be found elsewhere. In his author’s note, Enard cannily stops short of asserting the factuality of the ...”