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“... was less likely than his contemporaries to be seen in his full complexity and thereby reassessed. Peter Stanford, prompted and supported by Day-Lewis’s widow, the actress Jill Balcon, has now undertaken the work of recovery, and he makes clear that he believes this biography should provide the occasion for a major reassessment of his subject’s ...”

“... life, anyway, offers diversions. There is an affectionate portrait of another fellow conscript, Peter Stanford, who feels as passionately as Philip does about books and music and painting. More particularly, they feel the same way about writing. Writers were spies and interpreters who could undergo hardship and excess and emerge from the ordeal with ...”

“... taken from the tower of the house of one tycoon and looking down on the house of another, Leland Stanford. The houses, large, but crowded together on the slopes of Nob Hill like limpets on a rock, are new, the environment treeless. San Francisco was expanding, a lot of money was being spent, and the results were florid: one of Muybridge’s commissions was a ...”

“... Russian spirit would not have felt at home in the intellectual world Elif Batuman comes from. A Stanford comp. lit. PhD, raised in New Jersey by Turkish parents, Batuman draws strength from Foucault and Roman Jakobson, studied with Franco Moretti and has a blog on which she uses words like ‘w00t!!’. Still, both the Russians and the people who read ...”

“... do for the bedazzling, now-dead she-eminence. The most beautiful photo I downloaded was one that Peter Hujar took of her in the 1970s, around the time of I, Et Cetera. She’s wearing a thin grey turtleneck and lies on her back – arms up, head resting on her clasped hands and her gaze fixed impassively on something to the right of the frame. There’s a ...”

“... theory and towards the frontiers being opened up by drugs and neurotransmitters. In 1959 Peter Tripp, a radio DJ in New York, decided to stay awake for two hundred hours to raise money for charity. Tripp set himself up in a glass booth in Times Square, monitored by sleep researchers, where he rapped and span records for two days and nights before his ...”

“... both. More than half of them are Fellows of the volume’s parent body, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, California, a lavishly-endowed think-tank founded by Herbert Hoover in 1919 ‘to demonstrate, by its research and publications, the evils of the doctrines of Karl Marx’. If you are not already familiar with Hoover and its works, all you ...”

“... His lack of deference helped to open doors. At 15, he emailed Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford, with a list of suggestions for how to write the code for Creative Commons. ‘Good idea,’ Lessig responded. ‘Why don’t you do that for us?’ Swartz had been at the fringes of the internet’s free culture movement; this was his ticket ...”

“... It is easy to see why painters without his philosophical bent – he had studied philosophy at Stanford – found laconic, real men’s talk to be appropriate, like blue jeans and plaid shirts, to a way of working which set the visceral and energetic against the intellectual and analytic. But Motherwell, too, could talk macho. He describes how he and David ...”

“... Peter​ Thiel is known for so many different things it can be hard to keep up. He co-founded PayPal, which provided the basis for his early fortune as well as Elon Musk’s. He is the eerily prescient angel investor who helped launch Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook on the path to global domination. He is the man who bankrupted Gawker, the online gossip site, by funding Hulk Hogan’s libel action, fulfilling a decade-long vendetta that started after Gawker outed Thiel as gay ...”

“... in the concertante solo violin part of Heldenleben, just as Benjamin Britten’s dependence upon Peter Pears, the sharer of his bed, shines through most of his later music. Susana Gil alighted upon the gossip circuit of musical Europe as a living anachronism. ‘By God, William is going to marry a native,’ said one of Walton’s friends when the eminent ...”

“... other Timothy Steele. Let me talk about Donald first. In the middle of my studies in Economics at Stanford University, I was given the chance to spend a year in the Creative Writing Program in the English Department. I was not at all convinced that creative writing could be taught in the classroom, but I felt I could do with a year’s time to think and ...”

“... mettle in the towns, where they could prepare for government once the Red Army had come through. Peter Conradi handles this material extremely well, and draws on E.P. Thompson’s lectures in Stanford in 1981 about his brother, later collated by his widow, Dorothy Thompson, as Beyond the Frontier. E.P. is more committed ...”

“... himself with his hosts. Before Toynbee’s final tour in 1967, at the age of 78, a professor at Stanford spoke out with a pithiness and directness which Lady Carlisle herself might have envied: ‘He is a congenital windbag, and now a senile windbag. Of course he cannot help that. But he could stay home.’ Naturally Toynbee ignored this advice. He pressed ...”

“... the government and monopolising long-distance transportation in the west. With this wealth, Leland Stanford founded Stanford University in 1885 on the site of his horse ranch 35 miles south of the city, and it was from Stanford’s loins that Silicon Valley sprang.In 1959, the Buddhist ...”