“... minority. The religious divide ran through Montaigne’s family; his sister Jeanne and brother Thomas became Protestants. In Gascony, Bordeaux remained under Catholic control while much of the surrounding countryside was controlled by Protestants. As a locally prominent Catholic, Montaigne put himself at risk whenever he rode between his estate and the ...”

“... he was 17, Britten went to church in Lowestoft and heard ‘quite a fine sermon’ by the Rev. Thomas Henry Stanley, who was standing in for the incumbent, the Rev. William Reeve. Reeve was away – in case you care, he was in Blankenberghe, Belgium. On August Bank Holiday in that year Britten went to see a show with Paul Robeson in it; a supporting act ...”

“... sketched is one that has been very popular in recent philosophy. Its most notable proponent is Donald Davidson, who has inspired a good deal of discussion about how exactly the premises and conclusion of such arguments are best formulated. But so far as I know, Coady is the first person to extend the reasoning into the area of testimony. He gives due ...”

“... holds a special niche permanently vacant for those bookish old ranters (Michael Foot, Norman Thomas) who can qualify for that sort of affectionate obituary even while they are still alive, the paradox of the traditionalist rebel does not automatically connote charm or breadth of mind. In the Puritan revolutions of old, and the Islamic ones of ...”

“... effective leader of his party and an outstanding prime minister. Having reacted against Ramsay Mac-Donald, the argument runs, Labour stood in need of a personality who would put party above self, and Attlee fitted the bill. Yet in his quiet fashion he was skilful in managing the Party and holding it together. Hence Labour’s victory in the General Election of ...”

“... the line of great dead critics – Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold, T.S. Eliot, Trilling and Donald Davie. If, as I believe, this volume does add up to a book, in fact a considerable one, it is artfully shaped as a study of bereavement and of commemoration – not least, as a tribute paid by one of the living to great artists. An essay on Marlowe sets ...”

“... Special Operations forces.In his last year in office, Obama began accelerating that campaign, and Donald Trump appears determined to expand it. In March, Trump issued an order declaring parts of Somalia an ‘area of active hostilities’, giving US commanders greater autonomy to order attacks and allowing for more civilian deaths than the Obama ...”

“... his own, between inadvertence and acumen. (As when Larkin good-naturedly thinks it is a pity that Donald Davie’s poem ‘A Sequence for Francis Parkman’ doesn’t ‘tell me who Parkman is: one of his American friends, perhaps’. It is a pity, too, about the expunging of what I had taken to be just such an immersing in the deconstructive element: Sylvia ...”

“... label – borrowed from the abstract expressionist painters in their circle, and marketed through Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry – has somehow endured. In that anthology, Guest was the only woman in the New York School group, and one of only five other women in total (there were 60 men). She has seldom been included since. In 1970, David ...”

“... but remain inaccessible to human cognition? Here we are on well-trodden philosophical ground, with Thomas Nagel asking ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ and vindicating the incommensurability of subjective experiences, especially across species lines. Yet Chomsky has remained wedded to the humanist tradition and the search, the notion of an immortal soul ...”

“... leading management books of the Eighties have been American, and ‘excellence’ is their creed. Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman Junior’s In Search of Excellence1 appeared in 1982 and it quickly established itself as the best-selling management book ever. Here was an unambiguous riposte to the Japanese economic miracle, that Pearl Harbour of the Carter ...”

“... don who must have recruited them. In 1977 the Times proclaimed to a sceptical public that he was Donald Beves, the delightful tutor of King’s known to generations of undergraduates who performed on stage in the ADC, the Marlowe or the Musical Society, and whose interest in politics or indeed in ideas was negligible: clearly his bonhomie disguised an ...”

“... he wrote the same day in a note to Duras, whom he didn’t know. Two days later, he was telling Donald McWhinnie at the BBC, which had just broadcast his first radio play, All That Fall, that Le Square was ‘overwhelmingly moving – to me’, and, he imagined, ‘ideal’ for the Third Programme. McWhinnie agreed and passed the material on to Barbara ...”

“... to win a living by his pen. He was a fine translator as well as writer, and brought some works of Thomas Mann and Franz Werfel into English. Only a paltry nickel-and-dime dispute lost him the commission to complete Scott-Moncrieff’s version of A la recherche du temps perdu. (As you reel from this thought, reflect that instead he attained immortality by his ...”

“... by Kerrigan himself, Alastair Reid, Anthony Bonner, Helen Temple and Ruthven Todd? Or in Donald Yates and James Irby’s Labyrinths (1962), with translations mainly by Irby, but also by Yates, Kerrigan, L.A. Murillo, Dudley Fitts, Julian Palley, Harriet de Onis, John Fein? There are also the volumes, notably The Aleph (1970) and Dr Brodie’s Report ...”