“... Treatise and the Ethics. Contemporary philosophers who invoke Nietzsche, James, Dewey, Donald Davidson and Jürgen Habermas in order to strengthen their criticisms of the correspondence theory of truth typically share Nietzsche’s hope. They believe that the institutions and practices their critics see as threatened will in fact be strengthened by ...”

“... can’t be said for David Yaffe’s Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell, which can be read either as a fan letter or as the longest liner notes in history. In his preface, Yaffe tells of being ‘bitched out’ by Mitchell years ago for describing her Beverly Hills home as ‘middle-class’ in a New York Times piece. ‘I don’t know what you ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... delicate souls quaveringly sensitive to those around them) that means they can write letters which read as though there isn’t a real human being at the receiving end of them. Spark’s final parenthesis, which says that Barnsley’s ‘excellent’ novels are heavy-handed (he wrote under the pseudonym Gabriel Fielding, since he was distantly related to Henry ...”

“... wrote on his platform, ‘talking to themselves while torching $1B/year of US taxpayer money.’ Donald Trump agreed, and on 14 March placed its employees on administrative leave. Reporters without Borders, VOA and union members filed a lawsuit, and on 22 April Judge Royce Lamberth, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan, instructed that the broadcasts be ...”

“... an underlying story, they have no narrative as such and work as separate units. At worst, they read like a cross between R.D. Laing’s case-notes and Richard Aldington’s Imagism. At best, they have a force and integrity which none of the other poets associated with the Review, and few poets since, have come close to matching. The problem, as Hamilton ...”

“... fury of New Apocalypse. As for the Movement, two of its original New Lines members, Thom Gunn and Donald Davie, went off in directions undreamed of by Robert Conquest and still largely ignored by contemporary British poetry. Looking a little further, we find that Gunn and Davie between them do something that has still not been taken on board in Britain: they ...”

“... seventy-five years. How did it happen? On that question, Lubenow is wisely silent. He quotes Sir Donald MacAlister’s claim that ‘the voice that issues from the hearth-rug on Saturday night has gone through all the earth, its sound to the world’s end. It speaks in Senates though men know it not, it controls principalities and powers, it moulds ...”

“... grown-up woman, over 20, asserting that the excellence of Psmith proves that she is not too old to read the Captain. There is an article by an idealistic boy, called ‘The Aim of Socialism’, which begins: ‘Although Mr Wodehouse’s description of Socialism is justified by the excellent use he makes of it, I fear that it will only increase the delusion ...”

“... the question: ‘Can machines think?’ I heard more about the importance of Bletchley from Donald Michie, Professor of Robotology at Edinburgh University. Three years later I read Angus Calder’s The People’s War, a social history of World War Two, and resolved to write something one day about the war. I come from ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... amongst the crème de la crème of their generation’. (We are duly irritated, but of course we read on.) The three women are Cambridge-educated, professionally active, and in their mid-forties. One is single, one is happily married, and one is on the threshold of marital breakdown at the time when the novel opens. It is the evening of 31 December 1979, and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... than the outer one – the second is the one to be found ‘crying in a cocktail glass’, as we read in The Age of Anxiety – and the inner one had a field day when Auden was being rewarded for something. Although he was happy and flattered to return to Oxford to become Professor of Poetry, he had, at the same time, what he called ‘a very unpleasant ...”

“... Raiding, they said, was the bedouin national sport, like league football or county cricket.’ (Donald Rumsfeld appears to have taken a similarly sporting attitude to recent looting in Baghdad, although his tolerance would presumably not encompass looting by the poor of presidential palaces and museums in, say, Washington DC.) The British as occupying power ...”