“... and the debasement of words is a paradigm of the loss of the kingdom of innocence and original justice.’ His poetry may be massively allusive, but Hill is no unequivocal celebrator of intertextuality: the obtrusively anxious acknowledgment of all his sources in the Collected Poems implies a fear of robbing words of their just ownership. His poetry is ...”

“... whether he was up to the job, did he think the job was up to much? His later work is full of what Donald Davie, thinking of Larkin, called ‘diminished expectations’. ‘No world/wears as well as it should,’ Auden writes. Love is ‘far too/Tattered a word’ to describe a casual but agreeable affair. Minor ailments warn against ‘the flashy ...”

“... Smith – had stayed in Scotland to lead the party and the devolved government at Holyrood? Only Donald Dewar took the train back north and became first minister of Scotland in 1999. It would be good to think that John Smith, who fought so hard to bring Labour-designed devolution about, might have boarded the same train had he not died so early. As it ...”

“... The president, Andrzej Duda, in office until 2025, remains beholden to Kaczyński’s Law and Justice Party (PiS); the judiciary, public media and state enterprises have been colonised by PiS cronies. It is important to understand how a supposedly unstoppable ‘illiberal’ trend was reversed in these elections; yet rather than complacently celebrating ...”

“... brilliance and rags-to-riches narrative. The epilogue to the American edition quoted Donald Trump, who claimed Wedgwood would have been honoured to be described as a tycoon. (This might say more about the publishers’ desire for a good quote than it does about Trump’s interest in jasperware.) Hunt offers an analogy that probably fits his own ...”

“... and some will be justly winnowed. We could get down to winnowing right away. There’s an essay by Donald Justice on ‘Oblivion’, about how reputations disappear. And the subject has a lot of pathos, in that he talks about lives spent devoted to creative objectives with all that that involves; and yet some of those so devoted are doomed to be, at ...”

“... want to achieve is a simplification of democracy. The overall goal is often described, and with justice, as a sort of national populism, of the kind practised by Orbán, Bolsonaro and Erdoğan. But the mechanisms by which this new style of politics is to be delivered and entrenched are peculiar to Britain.The Tory right always loathed what I’ll call for ...”

“... interpretation of neoliberal theorists as hired propagandists for corporate masters does not do justice to the independent role of Friedman’s ideology as Klein herself explains it. Although Friedman’s ‘vision’ and ‘the interests of large multinationals’ sometimes coincided, overlap of interests is not the same as identity of outlook. The ...”

“... also chronicles the importation into Abu Ghraib of the relaxed standards on prisoner status which Donald Rumsfeld had already approved for Guantánamo (or ‘Gitmo’). The laxer standards allowed 18 interrogation techniques, including hooding, sensory and sleep deprivation, forced ‘grooming’, use of water, and ‘mild, non-injurious physical ...”

“... round capital … all we can do is perhaps bolt on a couple of tethers as gestures towards social justice.’ Or, in the more aphoristic language of the book: ‘Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed.’The text begins with a discussion of Children of Men, Alfonso Cuarón’s film from 2006, adapted from a P.D. James novel, set in a ...”

“... outlawing school segregation; and more black adults were under the control of the criminal justice system – whether in prison, on probation or on parole – than were enslaved in 1850. Once again, it seemed, the defeat of one system of racial oppression had given birth to another, only this one was concealed by the ennobling rhetoric of ...”

“... when recalled to Moscow, had a marked tendency to check out. (One such ‘disappeared’ member, Donald Robinson, falsely accused of contact with Trotsky in Mexico, later turned up in Hiss’s handwritten notes of the period and is the reason some on the left have always doubted Hiss’s word.) Chambers contrived to separate himself from the clandestine ...”

“... surprise – and a shock – that the guest of honour at Macron’s first 14 July celebration was Donald Trump, whose style seems the exact opposite. But the affinities between the two go beyond their unforeseen rise to power (‘You are like me a winner, a dealmaker. We’re going to work very well together,’ Trump told Macron on the day after the ...”

“... democratic camp. To allay public frustration, both Hu Jintao, China’s president at the time, and Donald Tsang, the CE, promised further reforms. An NPCSC decision reached at the end of 2007 explicitly stated that although there would be only minor modifications for the double election of 2012 – of both CE and legislature – ‘universal suffrage’ would ...”

“... Enright’s volume contained work by eight poets: Robert Conquest, D.J. Enright, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, John Holloway, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin and John Wain, to which list Conquest’s volume added the name of Thom Gunn. Insofar as there has ever been agreement on the matter, the Movement has been taken to consist of these nine writers. They ...”