“... outskirts of Moscow, when they buried Kim Philby. Guy Burgess had died in 1963, Anthony Blunt and Donald Maclean in 1983. Philby, however, was still alive when I started work in Moscow as the Independent’s correspondent there in early 1987, and his presence was a source of recurrent nightmares. Naturally I had put out feelers for an interview, but they led ...”

“... Jones’s Archway (a sculpture in the Heathrow Hilton, Ballard’s favourite London building), you read that ‘sitting in its atrium one becomes, briefly, a more advanced kind of human being. Within this remarkable building one could never fall in love, or need to.’ Even when the overlap between a work and anything Ballard wrote is accidental, or ...”

“... books. One in Welsh!’ J.M. Barrie, something of an expert on children who never grow up, came to read to them at Glamis. Crawfie was the first of the Windsor grasses – in her native Kilmarnock she would have been called a ‘clype’, a tittle-tattle – but bitter words against the crown tend to come from the royals themselves, not their servants.James VI ...”

“... Donald Trump​ vowed that the ‘convention in Cleveland will be amazing!’ It will probably be the only campaign promise he ever fulfils, but indeed, as watched on television, it was amazing, unlike any other, if not quite, as he later summed it up, ‘one of the most peaceful, one of the most beautiful, one of the most love-filled conventions in the history of conventions ...”

“... that are subtly unfamiliar to the rest of the Western world.’ Any one who has tried to read the Colombian novel A Hundred Days of Solitude – popular as that mysteriously was in its English translation – must surely endorse Hough’s account of the difficulties that confront us, not much less with South American poems than with South or Central ...”

“... of displaying an advert, deposit a cookie of its own in the user’s browser, and then be able to read it when the user visited another of the sites, so making it possible to connect up a user’s behaviour across the web. There is a network effect at the heart of digital advertising. The more website publishers engaged DoubleClick to generate adverts, the ...”

“... All his life Donald Winnicott took great pains to present himself as an orthodox Freudian. Yet few ‘Freudians’ have been more radical in their departures from orthodoxy. Winnicott’s central ideas about mothers and infants, about nurture and cure, about the authenticity of self, are evocative and powerful, but they are nonetheless heresy ...”

“... a stylish comedy that gently mocks Humboldt’s belief in an ordered and interconnected universe. Donald McCrory’s new biography, pious in tone and lumpishly written, could hardly be more different. Humboldt was part of a great flowering of German intellectual life in the decades either side of 1800, the period when Germaine de Staël called Germany the ...”

“... Four years ago​ , my brother, a philosopher, advised me to gamble, exorbitantly, on Donald Trump becoming president. If Hillary Clinton won, he reasoned, so much the better. If she didn’t, the ACLU and Planned Parenthood were going to need the money. But I wasn’t interested in hedging my bets: I knew what was going to happen ...”

“... For​ Rimsky-Korsakov, the key of A was clear pink; for Scriabin, it was green. Duke Ellington read the flight patterns of birds as musical phrases and saw the D notes of his baritone saxophonist, Harry Carney, as dark blue hessian. Adam Faith’s last words were ‘Channel 5 is all shit, isn’t it?’There are nuggets, visual and verbal, at every turn of The Madman’s Orchestra ...”

“... or a Paul Bowles. No one has had a greater yearning or been better qualified to fill this gap than Donald Richie. ‘Almost everything I do, everything that is known about me, is connected to this country,’ he wrote. ‘To be a person so intent upon describing a place not his own – isn’t this odd?’ Over sixty years in Japan, he has been a ...”

“... Variorum: A Defence of Heresy and Heretics’, the American poet Ed Dorn honours Donald Davie’s penultimate collection of poems, To Scorch or Freeze (1989), as ‘the most economical rebuke ... this age in moral free-fall is likely to get’. It is Davie’s most experimental poetry book: a series of religious meditations based on the ...”

“... this Bitch burn at my deliverance in the furnace of my joyful cremation. We were fortunate that Donald Davie, setting up an English Department at the University of Essex in 1965, invited Dorn to cross the Atlantic as a Fulbright lecturer. This was a pivotal episode for Dorn and for the mass of younger English poets who had heard rumours of Black Mountain ...”

“... of the medical intervention and the long complicated convalescence very puzzling. If we read Olga’s letters uncut, and the letters of Chekhov’s siblings, another story emerges.    When on 26 February I had some bleeding and I was firmly convinced I was not pregnant ... Ott and the other decided to do a curettage and confirmed that it was a ...”

“... experts in consciousness who have got to know the hard way where the limits of their theories lie. Donald Davie’s new sequence of poems, ‘Three for Water-Music’ (which fills the first third of his Carcanet paperback), refers not only to pleasant 18th-century entertainments by water, but to something like Yeats’s ‘words for music, perhaps’: or like ...”