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“... of a smart ex-preppie caught between the old ‘Townhouse’ of good taste, as vetted by the New Yorker of lore, and the new ‘Megastore’ where culture and marketing are one, as exemplified by the Star Wars industry. Born to the old world (‘taste was my cultural capital, boiled down to a syrup’), John ...”

“... A new golden age of technological hype seems to be dawning. This January, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, a small unfurnished booth cost $24,500. Some 2700 companies proved willing to pay the fee, and 140,000 people visited the show. To coincide with it, Steve Jobs, the Apple CEO, launched the iPhone in San Francisco: a mobile phone with a touch-screen and other familiar functions: web browser, camera, MP3 player ...”

“... anxious depositors outside a branch of Northern Rock in September 2007 – the idea that we might be living through our own version of the 1930s has proved irresistible. The run on Northern Rock augured a financial collapse on the scale of 1929, and has been followed by the re-emergence in the West of protectionist ...”

“... birthday party, who wears an elaborate costume in keeping with the undersea theme but may not be on the guest list. The two timeframes, only marginally out of phase, fold smoothly into each other when the narrative of Molly’s work day catches up with her evening panic and its aftermath. At this point Phillips starts to hold back the momentum. It would ...”

“... on seeing his studio on rue Notre-Dame de Lorette being dismantled. ‘My ambition is bounded by these walls,’ he wrote in his journal. ‘I enjoy the last moments available to me to feel myself still in this place which has seen me for so many years and in which was spent the great part of the latter period of my youth.’ He had spent thirteen years ...”

“... famous remark about the impact of the French Revolution, that it was too early to tell, might be said of the impact of the Oslo Accord. Said called his most recent book The End of the Peace Process: that strikes me as premature. What was started at Oslo is still alive, if only just. The peace process has broken down not because the Accord is inherently ...”

“... Swift is a no-no – too fast. The Russian national anthem – too slow. There would seem to be a political subtext here, along the lines of ‘One’s just as bad as the other,’ but let it pass.Where would Arthur Russell fit on the Chechnya index? Breathless dance tracks like ‘Is It All over My Face’, ‘Go Bang!’ and ‘Kiss Me Again’ are ...”

“... Inside are slideshows made up of photographs taken across fifty years. Goldin’s instinct is to be with a person in their pain – or their euphoria, or wildness, or ambivalence. She has said that the show’s title, This Will Not End Well, refers to Gaza, Lebanon, the US, climate change, Sudan, Germany and more besides. Whatever ‘this’ is, it’s still ...”

“... in the region. Besides this main effort, a squadron of six warships and two supply vessels, led by Commodore George Anson, was to carry out a secret mission around Cape Horn, attacking Spanish ports on the Pacific coast and capturing one of their famed galleons full of silver en route from Mexico to the Philippines. From the outset, almost everything that ...”

“... noble nature was intentional. ‘Staffage’ is the word for human and animal extras, I find, and David Teniers the Younger, whose work Turner admired, is offered as the source of their plain looks. Whatever his narrative intention, foreground accents – not just people, but boats, buoys, goats, ducks – are important parts of the visual machinery. They ...”

“... conspiracy: either the unexpectedly genocidal effects of the 5G rollout were being covered up by faking a pandemic, or 5G was being used deliberately to kill huge numbers of people and help enslave whoever was left. In the actual world, 5G’s feeble radio waves aren’t capable of any of this – you’d get more radiation standing near a baby monitor ...”

“... Or was it your first sight of those 11 yellow-haired Romanians? Earlier tournaments are now known by their ‘defining moments’. In 1970, we had Moore and Pele swapping shirts; in ‘82, there was the demented Altobelli; in ‘86 the Hand of God; in ‘90, Gazza’s tears. I’m not sure what it was in ‘94: Romario and Bebeto doing that baby-cradling ...”

“... In Euripides’ drama Hippolytus (428 BC), when the women of Troezen learn that Phaedra, their queen, is ill, they wonder if she has been possessed by a god or whether her ‘soul’ has been bound to her bed by grief because her husband has found another woman ...”

“... a young male was prepared for the rites de passage from which he would emerge as a full warrior by the tuition of an older male who was his lover. Further, the American scholar David Halperin published A Hundred Years of Homosexuality (1990), a volume of essays in which he enthusiastically supports Foucault’s view that ...”

“... an international symposium on waste disposal at Bosphorus University, Istanbul. This has got to be the Cinderella end of environmentalism, less cuddly than dolphins, lacking the apocalyptic quality of the hole in the ozone layer. That’s probably why they’re surprised to see me here: an accompanying wife, and a writer too. ‘What have dump sites to do ...”