“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... gods and spirits, worshippers burned, buried or immersed such votives – there was a chapel to St Thomas Becket on Old London Bridge. The lid of the box containing the Jamestown ampulla was inscribed with a capital ‘M’, which might have been the owner’s initial, or stood for ‘Mary’, akin to the apotropaic double-Vs, thought to stand for ‘Virgin of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The Oval Window is packed with lines from a 1981 book on database systems). I once asked Thomas Nagel where I could find the line attributed to him in Not-You (1993) – ‘Love of semiconductors is not enough’ – and initially he denied having written it. When, having found the answer elsewhere, I put it to him, he was delightfully ...”

“... to the full her talents as a close reader of word and image: one on the novel of ideas from Thomas Mann to J.M. Coetzee and Nicola Barker; the other on the creepily insouciant photographs of Torbjørn Rødland. In both cases, the gimmick’s compromised form seems like the only way to accommodate ‘“ideas” imported from criticism or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in its bleak, social realist aspect. In a review of Fisher’s 1968 Collected from Fulcrum Press, Donald Davie found strong affinities between Fisher and Larkin, in particular the ‘piercing pathos’ and the way that Fisher restricts ‘himself as self-denyingly as Larkin to the urbanised and industrialised landscapes of modern England’. Davie goes on to ...”

“... that particular stable. At its most philistine and provincial, it makes Dick Cheney sound like Thomas Mann. The secular Ten Commandments that Dawkins commends to us, one of which advises us to enjoy our sex lives so long as they don’t damage others, are for the most part liberal platitudes. Dawkins quite rightly detests fundamentalists; but as far as I ...”

“... Blacks, or immigrants, or a faraway national government, helps to explain why in the last election Donald Trump carried Tennessee in a landslide, winning 60 per cent of the vote and all but three of the state’s 95 counties. In many parts of the US, every month is Confederate History Month.Since the election of Ronald Reagan, historians have struggled to ...”

“... judicial reforms invalid; the US Supreme Court was asked (but declined) to disqualify Donald Trump from standing for president; and the International Court of Justice was asked (but declined) to order Israel to suspend its military operations in Gaza. These events attest to the political vitality of law, courts and the rule of law. It is an ...”

“... an index of 6.6 per cent, beaten only in the original sample by Hillary Clinton’s Hard Choices, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, yet even in this respect Hawking’s book has almost certainly outdone any of Penrose’s brilliant, but bristly and bulky popularisations. (A Brief History of Time is 256 ...”