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“... Conrad Black is not the only tycoon to have dreamed of global domination while buying and selling newspapers, and he is not the only tycoon to have had people fawning over him on the way up and shunning him on the way down; he is not the only tycoon to have lived large, issued writs and faced criminal charges; but he is the only tycoon with a wholly distinctive prose style ...”

“... From the economic point of view, this was the year video games overtook music and video, combined, in the UK. The industries’ respective share of the take is forecast to be £4.64 billion and £4.46 billion. (For purposes of comparison, UK book publishers’ total turnover in 2007 was £4.1 billion.) As a rule, economic shifts of this kind take a while to register on the cultural seismometer; and indeed, from the broader cultural point of view, video games barely exist ...”

“... Our early forebears​ continue to be very good at getting in the news. In 2003, on the island of Flores in Indonesia, a team of archaeologists investigating the movement of humans from Asia to Australia found a nearly intact small skeleton of what turned out to be an entirely new kind of human being: Homo floresiensis. The fact that its body was diminutive caused it to be immediately given the idiotic nickname ‘hobbit’ – because nothing resembles Tolkien’s stolidly Anglo agrarians so much as a 50,000-year-old dwarf hominid skeleton from South-East Asia ...”

“... Iremember​, back at the start of lockdown, trying to draw up a rough mental ledger of things I would miss. The idea was to try and anticipate difficulties so as not to be blindsided by them. My list was heartfelt but unoriginal and consisted mainly, now I look back at it, of various blessings of city life that I had come to take almost entirely for granted ...”

“... was an insight that could occur only to someone thoroughly marinated in academic ways of thinking. John Battelle, an internet-world insider and search-engine specialist, gives a fascinating account of it in his indispensable book The Search. Page was fooling around at Stanford, trying to come up with an idea for his PhD thesis. He had always been interested in ...”

“... to sit on so that at least I could force a smile’), Prescott and his bulimia. Cherie Blair and John Prescott may not have been the most unpopular figures of Blair’s government but they were the two who had the hardest time in the press. Both spent long stretches in the contemporary equivalent of the stocks; a scarring experience, and both of them were ...”

“... become the world’s first trillionaire. That means he will be worth a thousand billionaires. As John Allen Paulos demonstrated in his book Innumeracy, most of us have a poor grasp of what numbers on this scale mean; so take a second to guess, intuitively, what you think the difference in time is between a million seconds and a billion seconds. Ready? A ...”

“... The​ ‘Overton window’ is a term from political science meaning the acceptable range of political thought in a culture at a given moment. It was the creation of Joseph Overton, a think-tank intellectual based in Michigan, who died in 2003 at 43 after a solo plane accident. His crucial insight, one which both emerged from and was central to the work of the think tank Right, was that the window of acceptability can be moved ...”

“... with the publication of Tracts for the Times in 1833, grew in fame along with its great polemicist John Henry Newman, was denounced for being a semi-covert form of Roman Catholicism, and then suffered a colossal scandal in 1845 when Newman became the highest profile convert to Catholicism in the history of England, thus confirming what critics of the movement ...”

“... also phoning it in. Witness the completely pointless recent remake with Kenneth Branagh as Poirot. John Malkovich is about to impersonate the great detective in a Christmas adaptation of The ABC Murders – now that one I’m looking forward to.) A novel in which the detective did it. A novel in which the entire structure of the story was suggested by a title ...”

“... until the last half of this, the third game. A bit like not bothering to vote for Jospin say I. John was watching the game in a local French café called Gastro. On the final whistle he commiserated with the owner. ‘Of course,’ shrugged M. le Patron, in a what-do-you-expect way, ‘most of the team play in England.’ Superb. The Irish record in World ...”

“... possible. Shockley worked out first the theory of semiconduction, and then set his colleagues John Bardeen and Walter Brattain to work on a practical device to manipulate electrical current on a semiconductor. On 23 December 1947 they demonstrated the first working transistor. That invention won the three men the Nobel Prize for physics in 1956.Shockley ...”

“... classicus in the study of computing, robotics and futurism, and is discussed at length in both John Kelly and Steve Hamm’s Smart Machines and Tyler Cowen’s Average Is Over.2 Watson won, easily. Its performance wasn’t perfect: it thought Toronto was in the US, and when asked about a word with the double meaning ‘stylish elegance, or students who all ...”

“... In trying to think what Marx would have made of the world today, we have to begin by stressing that he was not an empiricist. He didn’t think that you could gain access to the truth by gleaning bits of data from experience, ‘data points’ as scientists call them, and then assembling a picture of reality from the fragments you’ve accumulated. Since this is what most of us think we’re doing most of the time it marks a fundamental break between Marx and what we call common sense, a notion that was greatly disliked by Marx, who saw it as the way a particular political and class order turns its construction of reality into an apparently neutral set of ideas which are then taken as givens of the natural order ...”

“... During 2009, it was difficult to find anybody inside the newspaper business who was not profoundly depressed about the future of the industry. All the trend lines were downwards. The migration of readers and advertisers towards digital media was already a long-standing headache for the industry. Then came the credit crunch, whose aftermath brought recession, further decline in sales, and a sharp downturn in advertising ...”