Search Results

“... results was its first and best-known invention, PageRank, the algorithm that assigns to every page on the web a value indicating how authoritative it is, based on the number and the authoritativeness of the pages linking to it. Its inventor was Larry Page (hence, cunningly, PageRank), one of Google’s founders and now ...”

“... and transparent blouses clotted with white flowers; ribbons, threaded through’ on the first page of The Last September. (Needless to say, this was nothing like my life.)And there was something so spiky in her sentences. The chunky solidity of her words and her difficult word order resisted any skimming along the top of apprehension. I felt the force of ...”

“... In Moscow, where I was living at the time (employed by the Guardian, as it happens, the paper Alan Rusbridger edited from 1995 to 2015), dawn comes early in summer and it was hot outside, though the city was asleep.* I switched on the computer I’d recently bought and connected to the internet. Once the screech of the dial-up had subsided and the browser ...”

“... of his readers wished for definitive images and final statements, Goffman tells them on the final page of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life that his metaphors – ‘the language and mask of the stage’ – have served their purpose and can now be dropped. ‘Scaffolds, after all, are to build other things with, and should be erected with an eye to ...”

“... that, as he says, ‘live in my heart and moved me to write this book’. His dedication page names a handful of friends then adds: ‘And for survivors.’ Why not ‘the survivors’? It seems a revealing slippage, this drift towards the generic. ‘The survivors’ would designate a distinct generational and cultural group, while ...”

“... and strangely skewed, like some sweatshop version of Vivienne Westwood. There are jokey names (Page and Turner for a publisher, John Elton for an American literary agent with a disfiguring hair transplant) and passages of broad pastiche, such as this from a novel about Shakespeare: ‘“Fye, Will,” said Lucretia, arching backwards and pulling William ...”

“... the best word possible’. Implicitly he was talking about subject, object, modifier, but on the page you can see him working his queerest alchemy in the more obscure realm of tense. His reluctance to analyse his style publicly is in inverse proportion to the degree by which he must analyse it privately in writing it; only a writer very confident in his ...”

“... years. In the course of that period he has spun off various lengthy by-products, such as a 732-page study of The Supreme Commander: The War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a five-volume edition of Eisenhower’s war papers, and special studies of Eisenhower and Berlin and even Ike’s Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment. Dr Ambrose’s ...”

“... father was ‘in the print’, and Alec follows him into the business. In one lovely, lucid page Spufford hymns the compositor’s trade. Alec joyfully immerses himself in the physicality of work, held in ‘a womb of mechanical noise, to be monitored with some spare fraction of a busy mind, because a variation or blockage in it could be a sign that ...”

“... Afront page story​ for the Sunday Pictorial in February 1938 was headlined: ‘“Ghost” Wrecks Home. Family Terrorised.’ A recent series in the Sunday Pic, as it was known, had invited readers to share their supernatural experiences. Almost a thousand of them wrote in. Alma Fielding, a 34-year-old housewife from the South London suburb of Thornton Heath, rang the paper (a ghost didn’t seem a case for the police, she said ...”

“... My mother is such a bloody rambling fool,’ wrote Philip Larkin in 1965, ‘that half the time I doubt her sanity. Two things she said today, for instance, were that she had “thought of getting a job in Woolworth’s” and that she wanted to win the football pools so that she could “give cocktail parties”.’ Eva Larkin was 79 at the time so that to see herself presiding over the Pick’n’ Mix counter was a little unrealistic and her chances of winning the football pools were remote as she didn’t go in for them ...”

“... speeches. On the preceding Sunday, the New York Times Sunday magazine had run quite a witty page of advice to winners, printing all the dull and conceited and hypocritical things that winners have been prone to say and constructing an all-purpose ‘don’t give’ speech out of them. And yet, on the night, speaker after speaker came to the microphone ...”

“... than prizes. The best things are from the youngest contributors, such as James Campbell and Alan Hollinghurst, and the less youthful A.E. Ellis. Each here performs the same narrative trick, telling some resonant or portentous tale through more or less awkward or impercipient or blindly obsessive observers. In Hollinghurst’s ‘A Thieving ...”

“... them is that they are both identifiable as storytellers with a gift for leading the eye over the page, and with an unforced expressiveness in their own very different kinds of English. Each book, too, derives most of this narrative impetus from pitting a heroine’s vitality and free will against forces – other types of entail, if you like – that look ...”

“... and more localised description of the fetishism of the Cantos than that recently proposed by Alan Durant’. It is less sophisticated because it argues directly from the Freudian scriptures, not via the revisionism of Lacan. But the wholly indeterminate because unverifiable status of the Freudian texts nullifies the one argument, Trotter’s, as much as ...”