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“... connections that everyone else misses, such as between the patterns on Burger King buns and the price of sesame seed futures.) But having put his money into Facebook, Thiel did his best to take it out again. In 2006 he tried to persuade Zuckerberg to sell the business to Yahoo for $1 billion, confident that the offer greatly overvalued the ...”

“... of absolutes in social codes, sexual mores and standards of beauty. The ‘sable Africans’, Richard Payne Knight wrote in his Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste of 1805, citing the testimony of several travellers, not only admire broad flat noses and woolly hair, but view with ‘pity and contempt the marked deformity of the ...”

“... or physiology. Payment or diagnosis.’ Money could be used to attribute value: when you put a price on something, you assume it has the same value, or utility, as something else with the same price. The body could yield ‘measurable symptoms of what the mind was experiencing’: when a physical diagnosis is attached to ...”

“... unfavourably received. The reaction of the members of Archigram and their collaborator Cedric Price is shown in a film from 1980 in which they turn up in a minibus, apparently gobsmacked – amazed, amused – and increasingly resentful at the sheer effrontery, the diabolical liberty taken by Piano and Rogers. Cook wrote with venomous tact of ‘the ...”

“... can be put down to Post-Modern faddishness, though vampires have a more venerable pedigree, as Richard Davenport-Hines notes in his agreeable romp through Gothic art from Salvator Rosa to Damien Hirst. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, now translated into over forty languages, has exerted an enduring fascination since its publication in 1897, with Dracula himself ...”

“... the chairman corrected her. ‘ “Mr Harold” has.’ Here, in a nutshell, is the theme of Richard Davenport-Hines’s book. Its early chapters form a heroic chronicle of upward social mobility. We first encounter an earlier Daniel Macmillan as a mid 18th-century crofter, scratching a living from the desolate but sublime landscape of the Isle of ...”

“... is a continuing faith that it represented something well worth having in their own benighted age. Richard Jenkyns has been one of the liveliest and most persuasive interpreters of the Classical legacy in Victorian culture. The Victorians and Ancient Greece, published in 1980, was a book that mattered. Cogent and formidably well-informed, it examined an ...”

“... as well as those like Lurie living in and around Cambridge. Older, established poets, such as Richard Wilbur and Richard Eberhart, added gravitas to the enterprise. ‘The emotional temperature of the Poets’ Theatre in the early days,’ Lurie writes, ‘was high, for most of the younger writers and their friends were ...”

“... Any additions he then proceeded to make to the new novel were designed in part to increase the price of the book and thereby his own proceeds. This was not an unworthy ambition, and it is only one of the many indications of Melville’s own commercial impulses and of his constantly increasing financial needs, as a writer in debt, with no private means and ...”

“... sending less mail than they used to, but that’s only part of the story of postal decline. The price of driving down the cost of bulk mailing for a handful of big organisations is being paid for by the replacement of decently paid postmen with casual labour and the erosion of daily deliveries. I agreed not to name the Dutch postwoman or to give away any ...”

“... The​ skills of the three top Soviet spies of the 20th century – Richard Sorge, Leopold Trepper and Ignace Poretsky/Reiss (better known as Ludwik) – remain unmatched. Sorge has always attracted particular attention. Ian Fleming called him the ‘most formidable spy in history’; other admirers included John le Carré, Tom Clancy and General MacArthur ...”

“... to what is seen as the arrogance of the Enlightenment, arguing that we are all now paying a price for it in the form of global warming, acid rain and so forth. Over a century ago, John Ruskin was arguing that Cartesian (‘modern’) thought had destroyed man’s reverence and wonder in the face of the external world, and that the death of God-in-nature ...”

“... Baudelaire on Callot, Donald Hall on Munch, Hollander on Monet and dozens more, including Richard Wilbur’s exquisitely meditative imitation of a Baroque wall fountain, a poem that sounds more like the work of art it imitates than any other I know.* The painting of Howard Hodgkin is a first-rate example of the vivid muteness that resists critical ...”

“... suggest. Some of these complexities are autobiographical. Mrs Henry Wood was born in 1814 as Ellen Price, the daughter of an affluent glove-manufacturer in Worcester. The family was cultivated and devout, endowing Ellen with the ardent Anglicanism that coloured all her work. Her grandmother was largely responsible for her early upbringing, and her closest ...”

“... caught off-guard). The roundabouts also symbolised a main source of grievance, the increase in the price of diesel.The provision of space for protest tells us how comfortable a democracy is with street politics. In the mid-1960s, the British architect Cedric Price produced a design for a Pop-Up Parliament, which would have ...”