The horses were always very willing when he had the reins and never cross or fidgety at all, and he could command cats in a way that the people of Nottinghamshire had never seen before.
On stage, they were members of a polymorphous shock troop of cultural ambassadors projecting an image of boundless joy – cast members were required to smile for the duration of their performances – not to mention innocence and purity.
When the book came out, Trilling wrote a positive notice in the newsletter of the book club he directed but registered concern about a dangerous notion he detected in the novel, the notion that one could have a meaningful life independent of one’s social function.
Hence my autobiography would be like the famous chapter on owls in Bishop Pontoppidan’s history of Iceland. The good bishop wrote simply that there are no owls in Iceland, and that one sentence was the whole of his chapter.
Much of the story revolves around Coer’s attempts to use genetic engineering to bring Countess Lovelace into the present.
At a party that same year held by fashion designer Fernando Sanchez, Ayer, then 77, confronted Mike Tyson who was forcing himself upon the (then) little-known model Naomi Campbell. When Ayer demanded that Tyson stop, the boxer said: “Do you know who the fuck I am? I’m the heavyweight champion of the world,” to which Ayer replied: “And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest that we talk about this like rational men”. Ayer and Tyson then began to talk, while Naomi Campbell slipped out.
(Update: Richman emailed me in response to comments complaining that her resume change seemed anti-feminist. She clarifies that she changed her resume because “Human technology and faerie magic just doesn’t mix very well.”)
For another, she transformed her resume from that of tech professional to that of a silly faerie who happened to work in the tech industry. She removed the references to servers and MySQL, for example, replacing them with job descriptions like, “I look at computer screens all day! And oh my gosh, there are so many numbers!” She scored an interview.
It isn’t the serpent that we should fear, but the rationalization hamster internal to Adam and Eve.
The major problem I had with his book was that all of his ideas were based on the premise that very few people were born with the mental capacity to act like anything but animals.