“... and was now clucking around the opening show wondering if perhaps the galvanised iron relief by Donald Judd wouldn’t have looked better over there, where the green lacquered one was. The two things that struck me most forcefully about him were his innocence – he had, after all, agreed to speak to me ‘off the record’ despite all the horrible ...”

“... To read Donald Prater’s biography of Rilke in the hope of getting to know the poet in depth would be a tantalising exercise. Lack of information is not the problem. There is no shortage of documentary evidence available to the investigator and Prater has made full use of it. Rilke himself supplied his large share in letters of a princely egocentricity, upon which he appears to have lavished a formidable outlay of time and creative energy ...”

“... defend the Church of England and to promote ‘the study of social and political questions in the light of the Incarnation’. The aim of the rival and larger Christian Social Union led by Henry Scott Holland was to make Christian law the ultimate authority, to discover how the moral truths of Christianity might be applied to social and economic problems and ...”

“... more people, but still not many. The problem there was how to get from the nature and essence of light as explored by poets and philosophers of the duecento to the light implied in the intellectual historian’s term, ‘the Enlightenment’ – especially, for Pound the patriot, in the American Enlightenment of which ...”

“... exclusively via fibre-optic cables, in which signals move at about two-thirds of the speed that light travels in a vacuum. It’s a tried, trusted technology. Fibre has the bandwidth to transmit the huge volumes of data spewed out by today’s financial markets. Although accidents do happen (farmers, for example, sometimes cut the buried cables when ...”

“... see with what, till now, was a remote hypothesis. The importance of the new explanation is the light it sheds on social history. England is here revealed as a rich country, at least in its southern part, largely removed from the pressures on material resources which were the common lot of early modern Europe. This is also shown by the low level of total ...”

“... Donald Rumsfeld, you could say, has had a remarkable career, stretching from a middle-class upbringing amid wealthier neighbours on the edge of Chicago, through Congress and high office in the Nixon and Ford administrations, including a spell as secretary of defense, a profitable excursion into business, and finally six tumultuous years heading the Pentagon under George W ...”

“... will, if carefully circumscribed, have a vital presentness to the current reader. Professor Donald Carne-Ross, now of Boston University, is a reader in the best sense. He is a Classical scholar by training. There was a Vienna witticism to the effect that one could always distinguish for acutcness of diagnosis between those physicians who had learned ...”

“... title bookish in itself): and it is too delightful not to be considered in full. This poem has its light-hearted but still mordant contribution to make to up-to-the-minute soul-searchings about ‘the canon’. What is Modernist about it is the foregrounding (as we have learned to call it) of artifice: Browning’s rhymes exultantly draw attention to ...”

“... Chaplinesque manner that compounds irony with pathos. At times, to an English reader, he seems not light-years away from Philip Larkin: but this is probably only a trick of the light and of the angle from which we come at him. For we are told, and in places can see for ourselves, that both his melancholy and his irony can be ...”

“... Harriet Guest’s starting-point is Donald Davie’s suggestion in 1958 that Christopher Smart might be considered ‘the greatest poet between Pope and Wordsworth’. Her intelligent and carefully argued book does not deliver quite the far-reaching reassessment of Smart’s status Davie must have had in mind. He wanted Smart to be judged over the whole range of his poetic output, both conventional and unconventional, ‘light and ribald as well as devotional, urbane or tender as well as sublime ...”

“... lavish patronage since its founding in 1974. At first, it favoured Minimalist sculptors such as Donald Judd and Dan Flavin and installation artists such as Walter de Maria and James Turrell, and certainly the early projects underwritten by Dia, from permanent exhibitions in New York City to massive earthworks in the American desert, were grand. Among the ...”

“... child, born into a family living through the Depression, at first comfortably. He has a brother, Donald, who is eight years older and altogether more competent. Donald reads Popular Mechanics and Radio Craft. He shrewdly perceives the sinister implications of Fascism long before American political commentators. Grown ...”

“... the sluggish drag of the body?What possesses the poor souls? Why this mad desireTo get back to the light? Seamus Heaney, Aeneid, Book VIThe​ suitcase arrived long after its owner had left. It was handed over to me nine years ago in the car park of a London church on a miserable, gun-metal grey morning. The suitcase is ...”

“... of prices, index levels and interest rates running across the top. ‘Diffuse, bright, fluorescent light comes from the fixtures four stories above . . . There are no internal walls to break up the space.’ The stepped amphitheatres – the pits in which trading traditionally takes place – are the floor’s dominant feature. In November 1999, when I ...”