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“... I do wish Donald Davidson would write a book. I mean, a proper book with a beginning, a middle and an end, in contrast to the collections of papers of which the present volume is an instance. My wishing so is not invidious. These bite-sized essays, each a mere fifteen or twenty pages long, often impress one as serious philosophical achievements even when they are read piecemeal, as they were written ...”

“... and Lonrho’s boss, Roland ‘Tiny’ Rowland, in his Cheapside headquarters, and the editor, Donald Trelford. This began over an article Trelford wrote about atrocities in Zimbabwe. The main point made in 1982 was in line with evidence given to the Monopolies Commission by the paper’s former editor David Astor, by the chairman of the Observer Trust ...”

“... find the old semiological fallacies enduring uninterrupted. This can be seen at once from reading Donald Preziosi’s The Semiotics of the Built Environment, which puts forward a theory of the significance of architectural forms. This theory, where intelligible, is palpably erroneous, consisting in a renewed iteration of the fallacy that sequential ...”

“... relationship shapes the very documents which purport to describe it. Unlike Margaret King, Donald Queller does not hesitate for a moment between the rival interpretations of the Venetian patriciate. According to him, the open book held by the winged lion of St Mark ‘is really a palimpsest’. ‘Beneath the official inscription, Pax tibi ...”

“... presents himself as similarly disturbed by tragedy’s unfairness: It will be many years before I read again Of the death of Cordelia, Or indeed (though he deserves cuffing) Of the Macduff boy’s stabbing. ‘Poetical Justice’ is a dry, witty exploration of one of Enright’s most characteristic dilemmas: art’s responsibility to life. In his discussion ...”

“... but only if solution might stay unrequited. The writer, Ivan Bunin, said that Chekhov loved to read out random oddities from the newspapers: ‘Babkin, a Samara merchant, left all his money for a memorial to Hegel!’ (Chebutykin, in Three Sisters, does the same, noting that ‘Balzac got married in Berdichev’.) The attraction of such tales, one ...”

“... The name Donald Francis Tovey (always rather pompously in full) used to typify, before career musicology swept all before it, the broadly cultured rather than narrowly scholarly writer on music, sometimes browbeating and always unashamedly didactic, avid to improve his readers’ minds, popularising without condescension or dumbing down ...”

“... Anne Maclean, two lecturers in philosophy at the University College of Swansea, when they first read the dissertation in 1989. They reckoned that half of it had been copied out of books. Yet, they discovered to their horror, the lucky student had got his MA without a viva or a word of criticism. Something was plainly wrong in the university’s Centre for ...”

“... School in the Point district of Lewis, remembers the small boy as humorous but extremely shy. He read and imitated Keats, Scott and Shelley, won a scholarship to the Nicolson Institute in Stornoway, went on to Aberdeen University and became an inspiring schoolteacher, but his shyness stayed for a good deal of his adult life, and he remained ...”

“... I subscribed to Power Slam magazine and dreamed of writing for it (alas, the path not taken). I read autobiographies by the greats, a wearying number of whom had found God. I read Mick Foley’s diabolical novel. I listened to John Cena’s worse rap album. When the Sun and the Daily Star carried wrestling columns at the ...”

“... out as an independent nation’. Ransom had recruited scholars and writers like Roger Shattuck, Donald Carne-Ross, William Arrowsmith and others who would have been more likely to land in the Ivy League or the great state universities. So Middleton wasn’t wanting for company. The poet David Wevill was a long-time friend and neighbour. The brilliant ...”

“... that Martines makes much of; for the part between the scourge and the fire you have to go to Donald Weinstein’s Savonarola and Florence, past thirty years old and as fresh as ever. Desmond Seward does not take Savonarola for a millenarian either, on the grounds that he was too orthodox a Catholic: when he said he would make the Florentines rich, he ...”

“... less clear what he takes the unifying thread to be. The eponymous theme of Incomplete Nature, if I read it right, is that, in each case, ‘ententional’ explanations must appeal to things that aren’t there. We’re told that since ‘all ententional phenomena are intrinsically organised with respect to some property or state of affairs that does not ...”

“... with its dreamlike logic and unpredictability, its mingling of disparate images. In 1960, Donald Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry (Olson, Duncan, Creeley et al), hit him like a bolt of lightning. Up until then he had been under the sway of the 1957 anthology New Poets of England and America, full of Lowell, Wilbur, Larkin, Hughes – all ...”

“... A familiar feeling. I was sent the script and the book the film was based on within hours. I read both in a night. The next day, at the office, Harvey never showed up. He was driving upstate as I thrashed out an uninspired voiceover with an incredibly experienced playwright for a presumably fired writer’s film in an office staffed by attractive young ...”