“... with business. So in 1962 I tried again and a prestigious committee, numbering among others Eric Ashby and Nevill Mott, was set up by the Council and General Board, and we made the not very astonishing recommendations that vastly more business should be delegated, fewer matters put to the Regent House, and a small posse of senior dons, equivalent to the ...”

“... theory – could solve the problems that plagued Bertillonage by automating the process. Woodrow Wilson Bledsoe, a pioneer of artificial intelligence, conducted one of the first experiments with computer-based facial recognition in 1964 (he had already done some significant work on text recognition). He had a human operator mark important facial landmarks on ...”

“... 1 January 2003. A Christmas card from Eric Korn:This is the one about JesusAnd his father who constantly sees usLike CCTV from aboveBut they call it heavenly love;And the other a spook or a birdOr possibly merely a Word.Rejoice! We are ruled thru’ infinityBy this highly dysfunctional Trinity!10 January. In George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book it’s recorded that Yeats told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (a solitary man’s expression of longing for still greater solitude) sung by a thousand Boy Scouts he set up a rigid censorship to prevent anything like that ever happening again ...”

“... life of Henry George, but he too was an outlier. Raised in the Orkneys, the younger son of Eric Linklater, he had something of his father’s unpigeonholeable talent as a writer and the same indifference to the opinion of others. He lived with the headhunters of Sarawak, completed Eric’s history of the Black ...”

“... tested the ideas on which the Guild was based, and separated the younger members, who wanted to go, from the older, a number of whom stayed in London. The hoped-for permanent rooting of the community in the country never took place, although even after the break-up of the Guild some of its members went on working in Chipping Campden. The unnaturalness of ...”

“... was theirs, and that the Conservatives at Westminster had ‘no mandate’. As Gerry Hassan and Eric Shaw argued in The Strange Death of Labour Scotland (2012), ‘Labour Scotland’ was always something of a myth, inflated by the first-past-the-post electoral system. Labour never won a majority of Scottish votes, though it came very close in 1966 and ...”

“... of Eastern socialism, and so forth. And (of course) to grimy Western home-truths like Sir Harold Wilson and Santiago Carrillo. But all that lies far under the alto-cumulus of theory upon which these arguments proceed. Christine Buci-Gluckmann’s Gramsci and the State unfolds on the highest stratum of this theoretic realm. In spite of its vast range of ...”

“... in Marcelle, who potters quietly about the shop. Every evening at sundown, she is compelled to go out onto the street, but she never gets beyond the front step. ‘Some inner force induces her to go out,’ Léance says. ‘Not to go out, but to want to ...”

“... is too much interpretation for Akerman, who wants to continue her plot summary. Things start to go awry for Jeanne when she forgets to turn off the light after a visit from a client and has to double back on herself. The next morning she wakes up too early, meaning she has an unscheduled hour to fill. Akerman doesn’t spoil the ending – which, at the ...”

“... of the communists who in the 1930s declared that communism was ‘20th-century Americanism’. As Eric Foner has emphasised, America’s radicals developed a distinctive language of freedom, as far away as possible from the white man’s freedom to dominate others, as espoused by Andrew Jackson, George Wallace and Trump. These radical traditions have always ...”

“... self-confidence I got from this fluke result, plus the breathing space it gave, that enabled me to go on doing silly turns, being funny and thus eventually to write.20 January. Sheila J. up the road says that in last week’s fog she came upon two Brent geese grounded outside No 60. She rang the RSPCA, who said that since they were on the road they were the ...”

“... In the 1990s, having retired to a Cotswold village, he sometimes nipped next door to have a go on a neighbour’s flight simulator software, which had a Concorde module. It wasn’t the same, of course, ‘but it gives you a taste,’ he said.Clearance from the tower came in over the co-pilot’s headset. On the centre panel in the cockpit, all four of ...”

“... portrait hung opposite the historical landscape, what light does Interesting Times throw on Eric Hobsbawm’s vision of the 20th century, and overall narrative of modernity?1 In overarching conception, The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire and Age of Extremes can be regarded as a single enterprise – a tetralogy which has no ...”

“... of that, as of another life, nostalgically remembered. Then, at that moment, to be compelled to go through all the paraphernalia of introduction, of ‘getting to know’ one another by means of the normal formalities of social life, seemed hardly worthwhile. We knew one another already; the future was determinate.The lyrical high ends like this: But what ...”