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“... At my high school, Daphne du Maurier was on the English department reading list, along with Taylor Caldwell and all those other books by Twain. I read Sydney Sheldon’s first five novels, Judith Krantz’s first three; until I went to college, I believed that Watership Down was the best book I’d ever read – and I was right. What attracted me ...”

“... They don’t, in themselves, ‘mean’. It is we who mean, by them.In just this spirit, Gary Taylor’s Re-Inventing Shakespeare offers a lively ‘cultural history’ of our use of the Bard. In fact, he proposes a new discipline, somewhat clumsily dubbed ‘Shakesperotics’, whose field is more or less everything that a culture gets up to in the name ...”

“... it must have been written in 1939, before the horror of the death camps had occurred – in which Sam Pollit, the father, tells the children in his amiable, garrulous way that if he had ‘supreme power’ he might arrange the killing off of nine-tenths of mankind ‘in order to make room for the fit’. This would be done by gas attacks on people living ...”

“... which became coffins’, Colin Ward writes in All Quiet on the Hooligan Front (1996). Lord Justice Taylor produced his interim report on the tragedy on 1 August that year. The chief superintendent in charge, Taylor decided, ‘could not face the enormity of the decision to open the gates and all that flowed there from’. He ...”

“... Progress in AI will continue, but possibly in a different direction. After the release of GPT-4, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said the company wasn’t currently training GPT-5, suggesting that they might have decided they were already at the limit of what scaling could achieve. They are now apparently working on their next release, though how it will work ...”

“... arty but commercially viable biopic about a man – David Helfgott (played by Geoffrey Rush, Noah Taylor and Alex Rafalowicz) – who is abnormally inarticulate. Helfgott’s very first words are: ‘Kissed them all, I kissed them all, always kissed cats, puss-cats, kissed them, always did; if a cat’d let me kiss it, I’d kiss it – Cat on a fence I’ll ...”

“... that Mrs Pepys, having learned the truth of his most recent indiscretion, is feeling pretty good. Sam has lain with her as a husband ‘more times since this falling-out than in I believe twelve months before – and with more pleasure to her then I think in all the time of our marriage before’.) Alan Clark’s Diaries 1983-91, published a few years ...”

“... prophecy and convinced myself that the world would end in 2007’) and an atheist who revered Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, and was certain (until he wasn’t) that only ‘dumb people were Christians’.Vance knows he’s good at appearing confident, even cocky, but suggests that it’s really ‘bitterness masquerading as arrogance’. He copes ...”

“... recent findings amplify his own earlier ones.Having made or bought the friendship of mobsters like Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli, the Kennedys seem to have acquired quite a taste for the quick fix of murder. How closely this was related to their simultaneous pursuit of sexual thrill and cheap glamour is good material for speculation. (That there was some ...”

“... the way men listen.’ At the time, he also dubbed her ‘Queen Undisputedly of Mind Beauty’. Sam Shepard, who hooked up with Mitchell when they were both on Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975, was intimidated by her intelligence, according to Mitchell. Shepard, himself a drummer, tipped his cowboy hat to her. ‘Her word manoeuvrings tend to ...”

“... gossip and history collide: [Barbara] Stanwyck was married to the ultra-conservative actor Robert Taylor, who betrayed fellow actors to the House [Un-American Activities] Committee, and she herself has just wrapped a B-minus picture with her personal friend Ronnie Reagan. Both Stanwyck and Robert Taylor are staunch members ...”

“... by the former Conservative Party chairman Ben Elliot. Starmer’s former chief of staff, Sam White, went to Flint Global, where his boss is James Purnell, who served as a minister under Gordon Brown. Flint claims to offer its clients – which include Meta, Amazon and Uber – ‘unparalleled insight into how Labour thinks and works’. The former ...”

“... and thus a member of Magdalen senior common room. It was a daunting community, with A.J.P. Taylor, Gilbert Ryle and C.S. Lewis regularly met with on high table. I didn’t have much small talk but what was the point as one seldom got a word in with Taylor and had I had anything to chat to Ryle about it would have ...”

“... with the corrections and illustrations of Various Commentators; To which are added notes by Sam. Johnson. This edition, with its much reprinted preface and doggedly commonsensical approach to the text, still exerts a palpable influence on Shakespeare scholars: Jonathan Bate’s introduction to this new edition of the Complete Works makes regular appeals ...”

“... followed. Would it have been the same if it had been a serving despot such as President Charles Taylor of Liberia, whose skeletons are now bursting out of the cupboard? Many Liberians voted for Taylor because they believed that the only way to end the civil war was to choose the biggest warlord as President. Arresting him ...”