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“... Gregory, who can see 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 ...”

“... centre which Wertham opened in a church basement in Harlem in 1946 with help from Ellison and Richard Wright. Six years later Wertham was called as an expert witness for the NAACP in one of the cases reviewed in Brown v. Board of Education. With the evidence of his experiences treating traumatised children in Harlem, he persuaded a federal judge that ...”

“... and surveys a number of translators who were information-gatherers for their paymasters (Richard Burton, for example, the maker of a steamy Arabian Nights). Briggs lobbied hard for the job of translating Roland Barthes’s famous lecture series at the Collège de France, and, in spite of being a newcomer to ‘this little art’, was ...”

“... The meaning of Hamlet must be intrinsic with what in it holds audiences and readers. And, even if King Lear has come, at this point in a violent and in some sense paranoic culture, to be ranked as ‘the greatest’, Hamlet is still manifestly enjoyed, indeed loved, by readers and audiences, even by critics. It has always been so, ever since the extraordinary ...”

“... dead master’s work. Shortly after collaborating on Timon of Athens, Middleton had presented the King’s Men with a double-edged homage to Shakespeare, The Revenger’s Tragedy, whose protagonist is a frenetic caricature of Shakespeare’s hesitant revenger; and near the end of his career, in The Changeling, he would subject Othello to an equally bizarre ...”

“... of radical Jews and well-heeled liberal Wasps, the New York establishment. John Hammond Jr (1910-87), to whom Stowe (rightly) devotes more space than to anyone else with the exception of Ellington, typified this combination. A Vanderbilt, Hammond was an almost absurdly typical Ivy League product and (in his last years) a devoted member of the ...”

“... Lord George Macartney, arriving on a trade mission and bearing gifts for the Emperor Qianlong from King George III (1793), was so impressed by the strong, diligent stevedores, ‘singing and roaring all the while’, and the healthy and agile women (who had plainly ‘not been crippled in the usual manner’: this was in the north of the country) that he could ...”

“... to be mad? Or that the bibliographer’s field has been as ravaged by fearful elements as King Lear’s heath? Perhaps, more romantically, Mr Laurence pictures himself as Browning’s supernatural knight, anxious and enigmatic, whose savage trample to the dark tower over the bones of his predecessors contained qualities both of triumph and ...”

“... conviction seven years later in a bitter review published in the Pall Mall Gazette. Discussing J.A. Froude’s novel, The Two Chiefs of Dunboy: An Irish Romance of the Last Century, Wilde attacks Froude’s patronising ignorance and then states: ‘If in the last century she [England] tried to govern Ireland with an insolence that was intensified by race ...”

“... as he did. The same is true of his strange, half-envious, half-disapproving relationship with Richard Crossman, a Winchester and New College contemporary. After they left Winchester, Crossman was Jay’s closest confidant. But he let him down over an arrangement to share digs, and the shock to Jay was so ‘stunning’ that they did not speak again for ...”

“... generation of Nedeeds has a Luther (the Christian name suggests Lucifer, rather than Martin Luther King) and he is always in charge of wedding and funeral arrangements, a solemn and forbidding master of ceremonies. The well-paced, ironic narrative, cleverly modulating into the bemused, commonsensical natter of white neighbours watching the black suburb enlarge ...”

“... of the aristocracy of the earth, all the advantages that any boy should have are in my hands. I am king over my opportunities. No one can take away from me the possibilities of growth founded on the firm rock of inherent advantage and power. Seventeen was the age at which Cummings entered Harvard, where he stayed for five years. His biographer tells that this ...”

“... President Eisenhower, having lost their earlier enthusiasm for Nasser, convinced themselves that King Saud would provide a pole of influence to compete with his throughout the Arab world: in short, he was cast by them to play a prime role in Operation Omega. The British, who had a much more realistic view of that sovereign’s spendthrift ...”

“... separated, at birth, who goes on to discover that he is his own non-existent, royal twin (Oedipus, King Arthur, Krishna). Wright regards ‘mythologising’ as little more than ‘lying’: separated twins who overdramatise their resemblances, or make up stories in order to get into the press, are ‘mythologising’, a charge supported by the likelihood that ...”

“... But the same is true of manuscripts.Cotton may not have known what he had. His librarian, Richard James, labelled the manuscript: ‘Vetus poema Anglicanum in quo sub insomnii figmento multa ad religionem et mores spectantia explicantur’ (a poem in old English explaining many religious and moral topics using the figure of the dream). It was not ...”