“... 1962, after going through many titles, more than one publisher (she moved from Horace Liveright to Donald Brace to Atlantic and Little, Brown) and many published extracts. Of this long, intense, drifting allegorical fable, set on a sea voyage from Vera Cruz to Germany just before the outbreak of the Second World War, and consisting of episodic, repetitive ...”

“... journal (Philosophical Studies, still one of the field’s leading journals), he edited textbooks (Donald Davidson once said that he ‘got through graduate school’ by reading Feigl and Sellars’s Readings in Philosophical Analysis), he was by all accounts a charismatic and devoted teacher, and he clearly believed in academic philosophy as a discipline ...”

“... ethics, politics and jurisprudence – notwithstanding its debt to professional economists such as Donald Winch – has emerged during a period when the history of economics has become at best semi-detached from economics as a discipline. Nevertheless, there remain some historically inclined economists with a keen nose for anachronism who question whether it ...”

“... and my eyes failed, I was neither/Living nor dead and I knew nothing,/Looking into the heart of light, the silence.’ On at least one occasion, in 2002, by the Pont d’Arcole in Paris, he came close to suicide. He was saved by his father’s mantra: ‘Work and survive.’ But the sense of powerlessness persisted. His father ‘has always seemed to me the ...”

“... ostensibly looking for stories but mainly just looking’. It’s January 2017, just after Donald Trump’s election, and something’s up. She’s suspicious of Felix, her boyfriend of eighteen months: ‘Felix had revealed himself to be completely unrevealing, insisting over and over as I baited and nagged and implored him to tell me his innermost ...”

“... by international finance capital to destroy the nation-state. In 2016, the New York Times reported Donald Trump’s allegation that ‘Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of US sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers.’ In her Conservative Party Conference speech the same year, Theresa May ...”

“... three or four acute details. One person mentioned in passing has ‘unrealistically white teeth, light pink hair, and an Instagram following of 36K’. After the birth of her oldest daughter, ‘Alix’s world became a place defined by Pack-’n-Plays, white noise machines, chafed areolas and grapes cut in half.’ Another character is summed up: ‘Long ...”

“... benchmark acts as a reference for a different grade and quality of oil. Brent sets the price for light North Sea crude, and since offshore petroleum is easy to transport by ship, it’s the main measure of market prices in many parts of the world. West Texas Intermediate, which is distributed by pipeline across North America, sets the domestic price of oil ...”

“... work was never afforded the same respect as her fellow male ‘outriders’. She was excluded from Donald Allen’s landmark anthology New American Poetry (1960) and was ‘not asked to literary events, though I published with everyone in the usual places, worked side-by-side with the men … As a woman, I was invisible.’The Beat movement is remembered as ...”

“... of mind, and in so doing it rests heavily on the work of Wittgenstein and the Berkeley philosopher Donald Davidson, among others. The aim of the argument is to show that preferences cannot determine values in the way that the subjectivist supposes, because values and preferences are conceptually interdependent. That is, it is impossible to identify a ...”

“... help from intellectuals is essential. ‘Reforming society,’ wrote Beatrice Webb, ‘is not a light matter, and must be taken by experts specially trained for the purpose.’ Nonetheless the intellectuals’ contribution to the Labour Party was more muted, their relationship with colleagues more deferential. This is partly because during the Liberal ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... from a 1940 review of Max Miller at the Holborn Empire, attached as a footnote to ‘The Art of Donald McGill’. The same four-volume collection contains 20 pieces Orwell contributed to newspapers, anthologies and magazines while on the BBC staff, but includes nothing he wrote as a producer except for a couple of letters and memoranda. ‘I am tendering my ...”

“... Annie Dillard (1945-) and Ann Beattie (1947-). Heavy in the hand, the Companion makes for pretty light reading: Joan Didion is helpfully described as the author of ‘nonfictional works on contemporary life’; the ‘Beat movement’ as ‘a bohemian rebellion against established society which came to prominence about 1956’; David Ignatow’s poetic idiom ...”

“... 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 ...”