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“... thought. ‘When I imagine the shape that will hover above the first half of the 21st century,’ Johnson begins, ‘what comes to mind is not the coiled embrace of the genome, or the etched latticework of the silicon chip.’ It is instead the images of computer programs that use the underlying logic of emergence to generate complex, and in some instances ...”

“... shows such as The Simpsons, The Sopranos, Seinfeld, and discussed, with much enthusiasm, in Steven Johnson’s book Everything Bad Is Good for You: Why Popular Culture Is Making Us Smarter.* As Johnson explains, the key to these new markets is syndication, selling the same thing over and over on different ...”

“... November 1963, just over two hours after an assassin’s bullet killed President Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, the vice president, took the oath of office in a hastily improvised ceremony aboard Air Force One. The jowly LBJ stood side by side with the grieving widow, her jacket and blouse stained with Kennedy’s blood and brain matter. An official ...”

“... of Cecil B. DeMille with taste, imperial godfather to the Star Wars movies and much of the work of Steven Spielberg. There is nothing wrong with this evocation except that it invites us to forget Lean’s earlier, quieter or darker films, which notably include Brief Encounter (1945), a black and grey masterpiece, and Oliver Twist (1948), an extraordinary ...”

“... Offering) on Nasdaq, and in September it entered into a research collaboration with an arm of Johnson and Johnson. The larger politics of nationalism, ideology and economic competition was stimulated by the smaller politics of organisational identity. What kind of place was the CEPH? What was its form and what were the ...”

“... Steven Aronson’s Hype, a guide to the latest techniques of mass manipulation, may have less impact on British readers than it has had on American. The word is a recent coinage, but since the days of Dickens’s American Notes or, even earlier, of Fanny Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans, we have been accustomed to associate the practice of hype with what many Brits still call the Yank ...”

“... Everywhere they talked about Cheyne and his diet. He was favourably quoted in Tom Jones; Samuel Johnson commended his books; John Wesley’s Primitive Physick copied out whole sections of Cheyne’s work; and his patients included Pope, Gay, Beau Nash, Richardson, the Methodist Countess of Huntingdon, Robert Walpole’s adolescent daughter, Catherine (who ...”

“... wave of campus activism against the Vietnam War was building. In damage-limitation mode, President Johnson declared a deadline for the CIA to end its secret subsidies to private US organisations, leaving a clutch of ‘orphan’ charities, several of which ended up being openly funded through the State Department. As for Encounter, with the CIA’s ...”

“... to have got the better of him. Most writers received a formulaic response. Feynman told Lyndon Johnson that the presidential telegram made his day; he gave his former senior colleagues a version of an Oscar speech, saying how he couldn’t have done it without them; he thanked his school and university teachers for their excellent service; he solicited ...”

“... the coronavirus outbreak quite a few commentators compared Trump to the fictional mayor in Jaws. Steven Spielberg’s mayor refuses at first to accept that a shark is responsible for the fatal attacks – he claims the first was a boating accident. When the evidence becomes hard to refute he still declines to shut the resort. Only when another swimmer gets ...”

“... source of gossip, the place that manufactures scandal, slander, falsehoods and lies’. Even Dr Johnson – who enjoyed his tea very much – acknowledged that sociable tea-taking might be ‘a pretence for assembling to prattle’. Women were prone to prattling and gossip, but ‘effeminate’ men could do it too. And the tea table was that sort of place ...”

“... scoff at such claims. The brain is not ‘a blob of clay pounded into shape by experience’, Steven Pinker has insisted. Its wiring may change a bit when we learn a new fact or skill, but its basic cognitive architecture remains the same. And where is the evidence that using the internet can ‘massively remodel’ the brain? The only germane study that ...”

“... portrait and William Parry did an ensemble piece of Mai, Solander and Banks. Mai met the king, Dr Johnson and Fanny Burney; a play about him was performed at the Theatre Royal; he learned to play chess and backgammon, and many agreed with Mrs Thrale’s comment about the ‘savage’s good breeding’. Banks delighted in showing him off: an aristocratic ...”

“... the upper classes, for a world on the brink of the Great War. The survivor statistics offered by Steven Biel tell something of the gender story: 94 per cent of first-cabin women and children survived compared to 31 per cent of first-cabin men; 81 per cent of second-cabin and 47 per cent of steerage women survived against 10 per cent and 14 per cent ...”

“... and temperamental … Nothing is more subjective and individual as personal taste.’ Hugh Johnson sticks with the crudity of stars (one star = ‘plain, everyday quality’; four stars = ‘grand, prestigious, expensive’) and tries to persuade himself that ‘the whole unreal business’ may eventually go away. It’s an American ...”