“... 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 ...”

“... allowed to infest the throne-room, Morris develops a mild form of megalomania. It is ghastly to read him when he takes credit for leaving the Bosnians to their fate, or for covering up for Boris Yeltsin, or for liberating Haiti, or for building a bridge (to coin a phrase) to Richard Nixon. It is ghastlier still to reflect on the germ of truth that lurks in ...”

“... parliament building. ‘Buying a Trainspotting postcode in 1996 was a solid investment,’ I read the other day in the Scotsman. Prices in Leith, apparently, have risen more than 200 per cent. How did they keep this going through the collapse of RBS and HBOS, not to mention the tanking oil price, on the slide even before the independence referendum in ...”

“... In November​ , a few days after Donald Trump won the presidential election, I flew to Arkansas to give a reading at the Fayetteville Public Library. I landed just before sunset. The earth was the colour of rust, the trees fiery with the end of autumn and the cattle, which grazed with seemingly no movement at all, were black ...”

“... from GPs towards consultants since the Second World War. But one of the more hopeful arguments in Donald Gould’s Examining doctors is that in the coming years ‘general practice will become the major instrument for the delivery of medical care, and GPs will provide more and more of the technical services now centred in hospitals.’ This development can ...”

“... Times in a series of articles leading up to the first anniversary of the bombing. No one who read them could doubt that the bombers were Syrians and Palestinians. The series, mainly written by David Leppard, who worked closely with the Scottish police team, ended with a scoop: white plastic residue found at Lockerbie was traced back to alarm clocks ...”

“... in greater depth and detail than had been possible for Darwin himself, the American psychologist Donald Campbell and others began to develop the notion that cultural evolution (including the emergence of such things as theories of cultural evolution) is also driven by a competitive process of variation and selection. Campbell called his Presidential Address ...”

“... encyclopedic memory, was a devastating and superior witness for the prosecution. This was the same Donald Card who, many years later, befriended Donald Woods and tipped him off about many of the security police machinations against him and Steve Biko. (Card was a professional policeman who became sickened by the behaviour of ...”

“... information to light. Its blurb called it ‘the only serious biography of the man himself’. Now Donald Spoto, author of The Art of Alfred Hitchcock (1976), has undertaken to show The Dark Side of Genius, on the ground that (according to his blurb) ‘the intensely private, secretive Hitchcock eluded the serious biographer until now.’ This is unfair to ...”

“... famine, corruption and literary gloom swirled round him? It depends on which biographer you read. The documentary gaps are wide enough to drive armies of theories through.’ In such a situation the would-be biographer is driven back on that favourite device, ‘filling in the background’. With a writer separated from us by four centuries and who is ...”

“... of ‘political thought’ would have to consist of several volumes (how many?) designed to be read concurrently. Within the Latin ecumene, the problem of selection does not disappear. Professor Burns indicates his awareness that ‘the history of political thought’ in this era could have been written as consisting of a number of ‘interrelated but ...”

“... For Mann being German came first, and he learned, as Anthony Heilbut rather quaintly puts it, to read German history as one long queer epic – he alluded to Frederick the Great’s homosexuality and depicted Bismarck as ‘hysterical and high-pitched’. When considering literary history, he enjoyed couples, charging the marriage of true minds with a ...”