“... 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 ...”

“... of Guantanamo Bay. Plato and Spinoza saw it as a realm of illusion, to be contrasted with the pure light of reason. Jacques Derrida deeply disliked the notion, suspecting it of dark metaphysical tendencies. For William Blake, from whom Martin Jay takes the title of his absorbing new study, experience is a domain of false consciousness and fruitless desire. For ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Gray is actually someone who is receptive to new evidence and prepared to revise his views in the light of it. Other, more consistent ideologues have come and gone, consigned to irrelevance by their obvious intransigence in the face of events. Gray remains, a bellwether for Thatcher’s children. This gives Black Mass a certain indicatory value. It was long a ...”

“... art, chimpanzees and, of course, the mummies’ skulls, it argued that the ancient Egyptians were light-skinned Caucasians and black Africans their slaves. Gliddon’s Appeal had praised Champollion ‘for delivering antiquities “out of the house of bondage”’ – that is, Muhammad Ali’s Egypt. Human beings in actual bondage mattered less.During the ...”

“... orientation’ which treats individuals not ‘in conformity with a general standard but rather in light of their possession of properties that have a particular relation to one’s own properties’. I have read and reread these definitions without getting much light on the second one. It is not just that I find ...”

“... Mr Kalugin looked as if he had been dreamed up in an Ian Fleming nightmare. His idea of light conversation, since I decided to ask him about some of the books under review, was to hint that he could say a lot if he chose. ‘Your Kim Philby ... ha, ha, ha, that’s quite another story ... Yuri Modin – well, he’s a character ...’ and so on. I ...”

“... when his enormous posthumous Collected won America’s National Book Award for 1971; its editor, Donald Allen, has since brought out a Selected and several more volumes of prose and verse. During the 1950s, O’Hara reviewed art and contemporary classical music. He wrote at least seven poems called ‘On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday’, and many others in which ...”

“... writing, for example, or a cacophony of voices from the Civil War, or a gathering of Victorian light verse, or a provocative juxtaposition of religious writings, from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs to the Book of Common Prayer. Suggestive and rarely predictable, these cross-cuttings place even the most familiar texts in a new ...”

“... a clever bugger but he can’t sing.’ Coward blamed the microphone for making him sound like Donald Duck and the humidity for putting his piano out of tune. But as the tour went on he got into his stride and the reception improved. The conditions did not. He slept in bamboo huts, keeping one eye out for snakes, witnessed the rudimentary medical care ...”

“... and guards in a mock jail, took a close interest in the Iraq prison abuses when they came to light in 2004. At Stanford, guards and their clients seem to have adapted seamlessly to life in a state correctional facility, and it is no great surprise to learn that during the Saddam era, Abu Ghraib had been designed on an architectural blueprint pioneered by ...”

“... one weighed 68 lbs, the other 82. We won the race.Although the space fiction and the traffic light similes introduce a slightly processed, jarring quality to this ecstatic moment, we have here the poet as a latter-day Yeatsian fisherman (Hughes knew Yeats’s collected poems off by heart). Again there is the ghost of a Hopkins-style argument from design ...”

“... 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 ...”