It has long been my fancy that the first Book of Jane Austen’s Emma could well be subtitled, “The Exploding Cigar.” It is great fun to watch Emma withdraw the big fat cylinder — her marital scheme for Harriet and Mr Elton — from the box of possible amusements, despite the advice of Mr Knightley; and even …
Since 6 December, I have been having an ongoing conversation with Claude, the Anthropic chatbot. We have talked about many things, from Poltergeist to the instances of the word “conscious” and its variants in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (31 times) and Emma (37 times). I have wanted to publish an extract from this extraordinary experience almost from …