“... has been a significant factor in the fortunes of many unlikely political leaders in recent years. Donald Trump’s affective state is one of seeming constantly on the edge of losing his temper. He appears braced for an angry encounter at any moment, something that has added a sense of danger and excitement to his political career. Boris Johnson, by ...”

“... he wasn’t praising him for any Eliotic or iconoclastic talents, which is part of the reason for Donald Davie’s complaint a few years later that Hardy represented ‘a crucial selling short of the poetic vocation, for himself and his successors’. The Larkin-Davie standoff oversimplifies matters, as Robert Lowell intimated when he said that the two poets ...”

“... a childhood friend of Matthiessen’s, was brought on as managing editor, and Plimpton enlisted Donald Hall to solicit the poems. They did a lot of drinking together and decided not to publish criticism, placing the emphasis on short stories, poetry and interviews. Styron was around, as were Evan S. Connell, Irwin Shaw and James Baldwin, whom Matthiessen ...”

“... at large, where borders and wars obtain; an inner sphere, comprising the Commission, the Court of Justice and Parliament of today’s EU; and an intermediate sphere composed of its member states as they deliberate in the Council of Ministers and its apex, the European Council, where heads of government assemble.For the founders of modern political thought ...”

“... memoir, The First Lady, ‘had a civil matter led to such socially disastrous consequences.’ For Justice Ormrod, the case – ‘the first occasion on which a court in England has been called on to decide the sex of an individual’ – was straightforward. Because Ashley had been registered as a boy at birth, she should be treated as male in perpetuity. The ...”

“... dies. Best known, I suppose, for the Henry Root letters, back in 1961 Willie, in partnership with Donald Albery, put on Beyond the Fringe. A deceptively gentle and kindly figure Willie was never condescending as Albery invariably was and seemed as much at sea in the world of show business as we were. By the time he came into our lives and though he was not ...”

“... This, the London Interbank Offered Rate, was explained with pellucid clarity in these pages by Donald MacKenzie in 2008.2 Libor is the single most important number in international financial markets, used as a reference point throughout the global financial system. It is a range of interbank lending rates, set after consultation between the British ...”

“... of Iraq as an opportunity to streamline America’s military structure and doctrine. Indeed, Donald Rumsfeld seems to have been so single-mindedly focused on his reform agenda, meant to improve the war-fighting capacity of US troops, that he apparently shrugged off the question of what to do after victory. Scandalously, US soldiers were given no ...”

“... leadership in Hungary, the judiciary and media have been neutered, while in his second term Donald Trump is trying to undermine the functions of the US state by wilfully flouting the law. Far-right populist movements are usually built around conspiracist demagogues who promise to remove rights from minority groups and whose supporters trade in ...”

“... thrown – by its utter beauty: the soft equanimity of its articulation, like the voice of justice; the sweet dissonance, welcome as pain. That dissonance, with its distinctive Tudor sound, is partly produced by a movement known as ‘false relation’, in which the note you expect to hear in the harmony of a chord is shadowed by its nearest relation ...”

“... June, the sixth day of Israel’s attack on Iran, David Petraeus gave some unsolicited advice to Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times. Trump, he said, should deliver an ultimatum to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordering him to dismantle Iran’s uranium enrichment programme or face ‘the complete destruction of your country and your regime and ...”

“... a work that has considerable respect for Puritan movements both Established and Dissenting, Donald Davie admitted in Evangelicalism an ‘openly repressive Toryism’, and added, ‘of the philistinism of the Evangelicals there can be no doubt’. It was seemingly this illib-eral philistinism that made Wordsworth, Southey, Scott, de Quincey, Byron and ...”

“... committees set up to cover specific policy areas: foreign affairs, agriculture, transport, justice, the EU budget. Committee appointments are controlled by the leaderships of the party groups – the centre right European People’s Party (EPP), centre left Socialists and Democrats (S&D), liberal Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe ...”

“... published a pamphlet of Peter’s. I never worked out how interested he really was in poetry. Donald Hall says that he was more interested in drinking beer than in poets. How old would he have been then? Must have been in his thirties. I never thought Oscar had opinions; he would just stroke his beard and smile.Who decided on the minimalist layout for the ...”

“... well before 9/11. Chief among the neoconservative ideologues were Richard Perle (aide to Donald Rumsfeld), Paul Wolfowitz (deputy secretary of defence) and Elliott Abrams (National Security Council senior director). All of these men contributed to Present Dangers. The book was a blueprint for US foreign policy, which would be characterised by ...”