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“... to bear. The brief biographies of 19th-century alienists through which Andrew Scull, Charlotte MacKenzie and Nicholas Hervey tell the story of the century’s dealings with the mad make it clear that Morison’s haunted expression could have been that of any of the seven ‘mad-doctors’ described here. The first of them was born in 1764, the last died in ...”

“... it wasn’t long before he was replaced by the private-school educated, wannabe barrow-boy Kelvin MacKenzie.) Now that Murdoch has 131 other media enterprises to take care of, his personal impact must be negligible, but the old Murdochian personality of the paper remains. To some extent its self-proclaimed ‘radical’ championing of ‘the people’ against ...”

“... The investment partnership Long-Term Capital Management was set up in 1993 by John Meriwether, previously a successful bond trader and then senior manager at the US investment bank, Salomon Brothers. Meriwether recruited to LTCM, from Salomon and elsewhere, an impressive team of experienced traders and specialists in mathematical finance ...”

“... albeit with some cyborg features, rather than taking forward what Mirowski reads as the vision of John von Neumann (mathematician, polymath, weaponeer, Cold War hawk, pioneer computer scientist, game theorist) of a fully cyborg economics, one which ‘appreciated the significance of the computer as an information processor for a reconceptualisation of the ...”

“... IN BRITAIN. This would normally be a joke, a fantastic flight of fancy to prove that editor Kelvin Mackenzie had at last gone mad. But when, the next morning, the Sun devotes its entire front page to the Union Jack with a good old British Tommy in its centre, and the rubric up above SUPPORT OUR BOYS AND PUT THIS FLAG IN YOUR WINDOW, thousands of people do ...”

“... of short selling. In 2008 Rowan Williams spoke out against it, and his fellow archbishop John Sentamu compared short sellers to ‘bank robbers’. (In the event it transpired that the Church of England’s pension fund had been earning fees for lending out its holdings of shares to short sellers.) Being denounced by an archbishop isn’t the worst ...”

“... money I spend on advertising is wasted,’ the 19th-century Philadelphia department store pioneer John Wanamaker supposedly said. ‘The trouble is, I don’t know which half.’ Today’s huge volumes of data don’t necessarily bring as much clarity as one might imagine. Everyone in the business would agree that the effects of what they call ...”

“... the London Interbank Offered Rate, was explained with pellucid clarity in these pages by Donald MacKenzie in 2008.2 Libor is the single most important number in international financial markets, used as a reference point throughout the global financial system. It is a range of interbank lending rates, set after consultation between the British ...”

“... is an imbalance) had almost exhausted their capital and feared bankruptcy. The exchange’s chair, John Phelan, later told the Wall Street Journal that he feared that if the exchange closed, ‘we would never open it.’ The crash of October 1987 had no clear-cut external cause: no oil shock, no massive government default, no Twin Towers. It ...”

“... globally – a big if – we will before long be able to trade carbon anywhere in the world. As John Lanchester noted in the last issue of the LRB, the science of global warming is not straightforward. The basic physics has been clear since the 19th century. What’s been harder to understand in detail are matters such as the many feedback loops by which a ...”

“... with authors of all kinds, from Gavin Douglas to James Boswell to Annie S. Swan, Sir Compton Mackenzie and a thousand others: the subject is God’s own gift to the sifter of anecdotes and the historian of large-scale cultural change. Trevor Royle tackles it with affection and enthusiasm. Admirable as these qualities are, the reader might expect ...”

“... and very satisfactory’, one of the chief pleasures being ‘getting back into male society’. John Cornford fought in Spain as a zealous young Communist, but his letters to Margot Heinemann reflect the same first-term-in-a-new-school excitement, the same all-male exhilaration. ‘I did quite well that day,’ he said of his success in rescuing a gun from ...”

“... published on the first news of the sinking of the Belgrano, is hard to beat. Even Kelvin MacKenzie, the Sun’s carnivorous editor, had second thoughts about that one, and changed it in later editions to ‘DID 1200 ARGIES DROWN?’ ‘I wouldn’t have pulled it if I was you,’ Murdoch told MacKenzie, according ...”

“... not free to marry him, thereby furnishing protection from decisive action.’ Lord Byron (also on John Murray’s list) once remarked: Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife, He would have written sonnets all his life? Russell never married. He was of that company called ‘the lost generation’, as described by Jeanne ...”