“... haven’t read her biography); not to mention Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, Peter Brazeau’s disciplined and rather stylish oral biography from 1983.It is Brazeau who supplies a fascinating list of Stevens’s annual earnings; who has the more picturesque quotations (about a place in the Old South where you could get ‘oyster stew from ...”

“... one another in cheery Slavic accents. I am well into bus-pass age, but am largeish and evidently white, and felt abashed when receiving nervous glances on pavements from smaller, less white women. The world of Chez Krull is a common, shared one. And some of those Polish builders might have come here from the same place (if ...”

“... used to diminish powerful Black women. ‘I feel most coloured when I am thrown against a sharp, white background,’ Zora Neale Hurston said. Gavin, an experienced biographer who has written books on Chet Baker, Lena Horne and Peggy Lee, as well as on ‘the golden age of New York cabaret’, should exercise greater care. (Incidentally, no context is given ...”

“... her sort through her letters and turned the most threatening ones over to the FBI. In front of the White House, a group of women attempted to hang her in effigy: they said that they were all mothers, and that Thompson wanted ‘to give away a million boys’ lives in blood and pain’. Senators from Idaho, Montana and North Dakota called for her to be ...”

“... the assumption that full participation in society required acceptance of the norms set by straight white males. Yet even as the public sphere grew more inclusive, the boundaries of permissible debate were narrowing. Critiques of concentrated power, imperial or plutocratic, became less common. Indeed, the preoccupation with racial and gender identity has ...”

“... Yudkowsky clout and access to a wider circle of rich libertarians and tech ultras, notably Peter Thiel. Yudkowsky introduced Thiel to Hassabis; Thiel became a founding investor in DeepMind. Thanks to Thiel, Hassabis then met Elon Musk, who also became a DeepMind backer, before co-founding OpenAI with Altman.Thiel, whose firm Palantir analyses data for ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as the Cambridge School, inaugurated a contextualist revolution. The school’s founding father, Peter Laslett, pointed out the errors and anachronisms of political philosophers who paid no attention to the genesis of the texts they studied. Although Locke’s Two Treatises of Government wasn’t published until after the Glorious Revolution of ...”

“... Peninsula with the explosive impact of a hundred million hydrogen bombs. The palaeobiologist Peter Ward, writing last year in Nautilus, calls it life’s worst day on Earth, when the world’s global forest burned to the ground, absolute darkness from dust clouds encircled the earth for six months, acid rain burned the shells off of calcareous ...”

“... Russia and yet Nemtsov had a full tan. Everywhere we went he wore blue jeans, a black jacket and a white shirt with the top three buttons undone. He addressed everyone he met with the familiar ty, which was rude, and he hit on all the women journalists. But he was totally committed to what he was doing, and bizarrely, bull-headedly, fearless. By this point he ...”

“... dropsy. There were further indignities. In 1810, a menagerie owner called Mr Brookes imported a ‘white camel’ to Britain. The beast was a ‘novelty’ in London, but Brookes wanted it to be ‘still more novel’ and ‘caused it to be artificially spotted and produced it to the public as a camelopard’. (The fraud was discovered by some ‘scientific ...”

“... force, and the Thatcherites were troubled by the ongoing costs of a fortified, garrisoned Ulster. Peter Brooke, who became Northern Ireland secretary in 1989, initiated the tortuously slow pavane that led to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, with a speech in November 1990 in which he announced that ‘the British government has no selfish strategic or ...”

“... used to appear every night just before the television news, with Saddam passing underneath on a white horse. On certain matters Simpson reaches firm, though not unchallengeable opinions. He thinks Saddam decided to invade the whole of Kuwait on the spur of the moment, possibly as a result of a personal insult spat out by the Crown Prince of Kuwait at a ...”

“... way be about him – which shuffles in on the guest-list a piece, for example, on Lost Highway, Peter Guralnick’s book about country music. Every so often Marcus extends the rubric: ‘Because of Elvis’s arrival, because of who he was and what he became, because of his event and what we made of it, the American past, from the Civil War to the civil ...”

“... to play’ and at night ... an emptiness takes form and approaches from the centre of the lawn, a white devil, smiling out of the dark, and the realisation dawns that I live in an invented place whose only purpose is avoidance, and what I would avoid I carry with me, always. Burnside gets his title from an aphorism of Marx’s: ‘It is common knowledge that ...”