“... how it came into being. He takes as his motto ‘Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.’ That is the title of a spirited 1973 polemic against creationism by one of the great evolutionary geneticists, Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-75). The maxim suggests two ways of thinking about brains. One is implied directly: start at the ...”

“... in houses where there were grand pianos or interesting pebbles thoughtfully arranged to catch the light, it was an introduction not only to the work of particular painters and sculptors but an experience in itself, an idea about what art and life could be. It was a generously portable idea. A drab student room, you realised, could be improved with a few of ...”

“... by the CIA and other agencies, a process known as ‘stovepiping’. This means that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz judge the veracity of reports from the field themselves (or with their staffers) without the information having first been ‘subjected to rigorous scrutiny’, and then rush the most damning reports into speeches, such as those ...”

“... less strange- Tho the face, still within it, Between glasses-place, over which time passes-a false light. In his introduction to the New Collected Works, Michael Davidson calls Discrete Series a ‘rather modest book’, but this is true only of its size. Andrew Crozier is surely right to say, in Modern American Poetry (1984), that it is ‘almost too ...”

“... Bryan Carsberg of Oftel smiles up in soft brown light as he dangles in the mirror on a green office wall. Michael Meyer of Emess Lighting is dissected by the blinds that cut across him and then reassembled from outside – his shirtsleeved figure looming like a target in the formulaic eye of some Hollywood assassin ...”

“... put Xi and the WHO in their place. He sat in front of a blank blue screen in rimless glasses and a light grey suit, his hair slicked down 1950s-style, bearing an uncomfortable resemblance to the late Donald Pleasence.It took Azar, Donald Trump’s health secretary and a one-time ...”

“... is one of those poets who make the writing of poetry into the subject of the poems they write,’ Donald Davie noted with some scepticism. ‘The commonsense view is that this drastically limits the importance and interest of what they write; and I think this is true.’ But Graham could conceive nothing more important or interesting:To be always alone is ...”

“... I think there’s more to that argument than Jones allows. The attempts of a leader like Donald Trump to ban Muslims from entering the US, or to build a wall on the border with Mexico, are more about racism and identity than they are about economics or security. And by focusing on the geographical border, Jones neglects the way in which immigration ...”

“... a means for better understanding the conservative cause to which Genovese is devoted and shedding light on those aspects of the past – the Southern past especially – that have been long neglected. Genovese’s own past is an unconventional one for a chiefly regional historian. Unlike many other historians of the American South, he was not born, reared and ...”

“... bluebells? There are further guest appearances by Proust, Freud, Virginia Woolf, Ramsay Mac Donald, Winston Churchill and other ‘stars’, and it is not every pair of Cockney youngsters who travel to France, as Amos and Zak do, in a laundry-basket full of General Haig’s underpants. All this is good fun, but the dialogue is sometimes inexcusably ...”

“... that you can’t take your eyes off him; everything he does is full of sleaze and interest. Donald Sutherland, by contrast, as the top military man who, off the record, confirms all of Garrison’s darkest and most far-reaching suspicions, merely oozes complacency: it is so satisfying to think your President has been murdered in a plot involving all the ...”

“... a psephologist, aren’t you?’ the Queen once said to the great American political sociologist, Donald Stokes, who collaborated with Butler in the Sixties and Seventies. To which Stokes, who was fond of telling the story, replied: ‘Absolutely not, ma’am.’ Impressed by the Nuffield studies, French political scientists based at Sciences Po (the Ecole ...”

“... the pluck and slop of brackish water as the signs button down snugly on their referents, whereas Donald Davie’s words stand at a chaster distance from his meanings. This, needless to say, is linguistic nonsense. Basil Bunting’s words are no closer to his material objects than Thomas Hardy’s, for all that the former came from the North-East and the ...”

“... other proxies, such as Israel and Iraq, though with little success. Giving Israel the green light to destroy the PLO led to the Lebanon debacle in 1982. Cynically supporting Saddam Hussein in his war of aggression against the mullahs in Tehran led to pointless slaughter. Each of these episodes opened a door through which US forces entered the region. In ...”

“... of 1960, Epoch, a quarterly published at Cornell, carried ‘The River Jordan’, a story by ‘Donald R. DeLillo’. It tells of a day in the life of Emil Burke, a mad Manhattan septuagenarian who leads a storefront chapel called the Psychic Church of the Crucified Christ, with a congregation of four. In the morning he descends to the Times Square subway ...”