“... of the legend. You don’t need, and could hardly have, a point or a plot. Then two things happen. Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber miss a very easy shot, a chance to do something interesting without trying, even within the confines of the genre; and Alan Parker caves into the idea of death. You think those long closing scenes are going to be about Eva Perón ...”

“... The ‘pretty little Lady Belchamber’ is a heartless monster, and a very gripping one on the page, given the benefit of Sturgis’s most witheringly sarcastic manner; while Sainty himself, with his ‘terrible habit of appreciating other people’s points of view’, seems to sympathise with her even as she is destroying him. To that New York Times ...”

“... rooms’ and reading old newspaper articles. It was around this time that the programmer Tim Berners-Lee wrote the code for the World Wide Web, which, in due course, Carr would be restlessly exploring with the aid of his new Netscape browser. ‘You know the rest of the story because it’s probably your story too,’ he writes. Ever-faster ...”

“... postwar period “self-commodify” in this sense,’ McGurl continues, inviting us to ‘think of Tim O’Brien and his lifelong use of nine months in Vietnam.’ Indeed, think of Tim O’Brien. As a White Person, he couldn’t write about most of his life experience, which was probably just like Father Knows ...”

“... we’re trying to reach men … maybe we should target people that “like” Bruce Willis’s page because he’s an action star … That was what you did.’ However, he said, Facebook’s increasingly sophisticated machine learning has made such discussions a waste of time. ‘Facebook has basically internalised all that and now you’re just feeding it ...”

“... inside information on the Tour is not to be found in a competitor’s words. In The Rider, his 150-page account of a 150-kilometre bike race, the Dutch novelist Tim Krabbé compares the mind of a professional cyclist to a flawless ball-bearing: ‘Its almost perfect lack of surface structure ensures that it strikes nothing ...”

“... up the previous year, an online edition of the Sunday Times. My first thought when the front page loaded was that somebody in the Murdoch organisation must be in terrible trouble. They had obviously been messing around with imaginary stories on their system in the small hours of the morning, and one of them had accidentally gone live. I can’t remember ...”

“... get as far away from them as possible.’ When Beaumont died in 2016, the Sark Newspaper’s front page referred to his ‘abuse of power, his abuses of human rights and crimes against humanity – all of which has been unseen in the Western world since the days of Nazi Germany’. (That same week his son received a letter from David offering to buy the ...”

“... he had shown my poem “anche a Domini Deo”.’ Pound asked his publisher for a special set of page proofs containing only the ‘Malatesta Cantos’, which he would be ‘sending ... to il Comandante’ in Rimini. Eight years later he recalled Marchetti in Jefferson and/or Mussolini, his most sustained defence of the Fascist regime: ‘NOI CI FACCIAMO ...”

“... of indeterminacy of many younger people, their rejection of fixity and concerns with fluidity. Tim Parks, a translator as well as a writer of fiction, says in The Novel: A Survival Skill that ‘we involve ourselves in ongoing relationships with writers and position ourselves in relation to them and the kind of stories they tell, much as we position ...”

“... more consideration, gets nine lines, and Chandler only dates of birth and death, White gets a page and a half (68 lines) and a humanist fanfare: ‘These and other novels ... are outstanding in their range of social portraiture, psychological penetration, imaginative power, in their deep instinctive understanding of the true life-giving sources of the ...”

“... died on a visit to Bristol in 1833, Tillett sits on a suitcase, reading a newspaper. On its back page, a headline declares: ‘Former Easton Waif Unionises Nation’s Unskilled Workers’.In 2024, Henry Palmer, who grew up in Easton, stood for Labour in St George Central Ward. Its two council seats went to the Greens. ‘My campaign was overshadowed by ...”

“... recognition. The process can be seen at work in Google’s translation software. Translate was a page on Google into which you could type text and see it rendered into a short list of other languages. When the software first launched, in 2006, it was an impressive joke: impressive because it existed at all, but a joke because the translations were wildly ...”

“... which specialises in – inter alia – drugs, arms smuggling and money laundering. (In a 488-page submission to the Audiencia Nacional last year, the prosecutors presented evidence that a leader of the Tambov gang, Gennady Petrov, had been a shareholder in the 1990s in Bank Rossiya, along with several close allies of Putin. After he became president, the ...”

“... you something about Saul Alinsky. He wrote a book called Rules for Radicals. On the dedication page, it acknowledges Lucifer, the original radical who gained his own kingdom. Now, think about that … So are we willing to elect someone as president who has as their role model somebody who acknowledges Lucifer? Think about that. (Although Alinsky – who ...”