Search Results

“... I first heard of Turing in 1975 when I was writing a magazine piece on machine intelligence. Dr Christopher Evans of the National Physical Laboratories gave me an article by Turing, published in 1950 in Mind, entitled ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’. In it he proposed the ‘imitation game’ as an operational procedure for approaching the ...”

“... found him a congenial member of their society, and with some of them, like Arthur Platt and Andrew Gow, he was on easy terms. It is interesting to learn that, on the trips abroad which he began to make after his appointment to the London Chair, Housman was able to find satisfaction for his sexual needs in a manner he would not have ventured to attempt ...”

“... Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, published in 2016, the political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels described what happened when sharks started attacking bathers off the New Jersey shore in the summer of 1916. It was a wholly unexpected turn of events: sharks had never been seen that far north before. When lifeguards began ...”

“... it ‘celebrated and anatomised the ethic of mid-20th-century liberalism’, and, without doing a Christopher Ricks, who unnecessarily upgraded Bob Dylan’s songs to Great Poetry rather than the more-than-adequate great lyrics that they are, also wanted to claim that there was enough serious and educated thought behind the creation of the series to merit his ...”

“... I laughed, imagining the guy in the bus with the microphone, the tour operator, pointing to Sir Christopher Wren’s construction, on the left, and on the right, pointing to me, Baroness Thatcher’s. I felt edgy at that corner though; it was too open; I was getting a lot of looks and the City is notoriously tight with beggars, indeed with everyone. I ...”

“... Leavitt’s analysis can be painfully self-regarding, but it furnishes anguish with meaning. Andrew explains to Celia later on: ‘Growing up a fag is a strange thing. You never learn about boys’ bodies because you’re afraid of what you will feel and you never learn about girls’ bodies because you’re afraid of what you won’t feel.’ If ...”

“... political order – whether or not this was their prime purpose in carrying out these tasks. Andrew Porter’s essay shows how the British (like the Spanish and the Dutch) used print as a prime imperial auxiliary. It spread their language and religion. It fuelled their bureaucracies and propaganda. And by deciding that certain local languages should be ...”

“... Literary Brat Pack, Manhattan’s bohemian answer to Hollywood’s Brat Pack (Emilio Estevez, Andrew McCarthy, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Molly Ringwald – almost any actor who appeared in a John Hughes teen film qualified). The Literary Brat Pack was a journalistic readymade, roping together a number of writers who may have scarcely known each other and ...”

“... style to the new medium. In 1952 he made contact with another producer looking for a TV project, Andrew Miller Jones. Miller Jones was an ex-Army officer with a yellow Rolls-Royce, the first of a large number of Panorama staff over the next fifty years with either a military background or an ostentatious personal style, or both. Together, Miller Jones and ...”

“... performance, the long-breath rant with its doomsday imagery, its wild repetitions in the mode of Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno, persuaded Ferlinghetti to send a telegram paraphrasing the note from Emerson to Whitman from the appendix to Leaves of Grass. ‘I GREET YOU AT THE BEGINNING OF A GREAT CAREER. WHEN DO I GET MANUSCrIPT OF “HOWL”?’ Howl ...”

“... judicious account of Nabokov’s life in the States, and, post-Lolita, in Montreux. Disposing of Andrew Field, his predecessor in the field, Brian Boyd cites his insolent, perfunctory response to one of Nabokov’s factual corrections. Told an event had taken place in July and not on ‘a wet autumnal day’, Field emended the phrase to ‘a wet autumnal day ...”

“... other contributions to the Oxford History. The chapter on Southern Africa in the 19th century by Christopher Saunders and Iain Smith benignly suggests that ‘British troops repeatedly intervened to play a crucial role in supporting settlers who were unable on their own to displace African farmers.’ No attempt is made to describe what ‘intervention’ or ...”

“... each sent a Fortnum’s hamper for Christmas. He names the names: Simon Heffer of the Daily Mail, Andrew Pierce of the Daily Mail, Christopher Hope at the Daily Telegraph and Caroline Wheeler at the Sunday Express. He even quotes Heffer’s thank-you note: he found the hamper at home when he got in after ‘an arduous day ...”

“... about her, usually in snobbish terms. The snobbery is equally distributed between left and right. Christopher Isherwood called her ‘quite a common little thing’. Richard Eyre said that ‘if it weren’t for the sharp English upper-class voice, you’d say she looks like a Maltese landlady.’ Cecil Beaton described her as vulgar and later as ‘a poor ...”

“... and the libel laws to avoid prosecution, and Waugh felt the press had been craven. In 1977 Andrew Newton, the comically incompetent hit man who had missed Scott but killed his dog, Rinka, was released from prison and started hawking his story round the papers. Thorpe, as anxious to deny his homosexuality as the charge of attempted murder, set out to ...”