“... in the history of American federal law enforcement. For the ATF, the FBI and the Department of Justice – whose head, the Clinton-appointed attorney general Janet Reno, had signed off on the tear-gas plan – the episode was a disaster from start to finish, as two new books by the journalists Kevin Cook and Jeff Guinn make clear. Among the most damning ...”

“... sure ‘whether the Western way of life, and our liberal democratic systems, can survive’. Donald Trump has also chimed in, asking ‘whether the West has the will to survive’. These apocalyptic Westernists long to turn things around, to make their shattered world whole again. David Goodhart, the founding editor of Prospect, told the New York Times ...”

“... new forum for Scottish nationalism, but filling it with more competition than Labour was used to. Donald Dewar, who steered Labour’s plans for devolution in the 1990s, presented this as a virtue: ‘What we have got to do is persuade Scotland that fear must be conquered and that canny caution be put on one side. The people must decide if they are prepared ...”

“... Stuart Macintyre, discussing the whole project, put it succinctly: ‘It’s not easy to do justice to the underdog in a volume with gold-blocked end-leaves.’The contradictions which cut between the printed substance and its packaging can also be traced, in a kind of zigzag, between the more and less conservative volumes in the set, even within ...”

“... for whom identification with an explicitly illiberal, openly racist state, led by a close ally of Donald Trump, is impossible to stomach. As Peter Beinart wrote in 2010, the Jewish establishment asked American Jews to ‘check their liberalism at Zionism’s door’, only to find that ‘many young Jews had checked their Zionism instead.’The conflict that ...”

“... of Israeli left factions but two dozen from centrist and centre-left parties, and even a former justice minister, Meir Sheetrit, of the right-wing Likud Party.  The following week the two largest parties in the Knesset – Likud and the centrist Blue and White, which together commanded a parliamentary majority – signed an agreement to form a coalition ...”

“... caravan for some years and later a cottage to which the word ‘spartan’ doesn’t really do justice – ‘a leaking roof, no cooking stove, no electricity, an outside toilet and no bathroom,’ one visitor remembered. He was ‘fairly indifferent to ordinary domestic comforts’, the editors of his correspondence report, putting it mildly. Graham ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of mind, and in so doing it rests heavily on the work of Wittgenstein and the Berkeley philosopher Donald Davidson, among others. The aim of the argument is to show that preferences cannot determine values in the way that the subjectivist supposes, because values and preferences are conceptually interdependent. That is, it is impossible to identify a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... simple: we need enormous economic growth, indeed an economic miracle, in order to finance social justice – and we can have the miracle. How? The answers are unfortunately all too familiar. The public sector must lead growth. (Oh dear! Where and when has a public sector ever done this?) Import controls must help. (Help whom? The export industries?) The ...”

“... manipulated by a ruthless establishment which had over the sacking of Whitlam included the Chief Justice of Australia – was rigged in favour of the haves and the political party that represented their interests. The beneficiary of 11 November was not a conciliatory man. Fraser, too, was a kicker of heads, and in this respect, if in few others, he could not ...”

“... seventy-five years. How did it happen? On that question, Lubenow is wisely silent. He quotes Sir Donald MacAlister’s claim that ‘the voice that issues from the hearth-rug on Saturday night has gone through all the earth, its sound to the world’s end. It speaks in Senates though men know it not, it controls principalities and powers, it moulds ...”

“... 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 ...”