“... By one of those coincidences which one is minded mindlessly to call ironical, both arms of Donald Davie’s Czeslaw Milosz and the Insufficiency of Lyric are also embraced in Enright’s book. Enright has a section on ‘Milosz and the Case Against’, a respectful wary circling which becomes incautious only at the moment when, with rhetorical ...”

“... extremism’ programme would be limited to Islamist radicals. White nationalists were exultant. ‘Donald Trump is setting us free,’ the Daily Stormer website crowed. Trump is so hollow a person, so impulsive a leader, that it’s easy to miss the great paradox of his presidency: that a cipher of a man has revealed the hidden depths, the ugly unmastered ...”

“... lyre, like the bard Demodocus in the Odyssey and for many centuries after his death people did not read Homer: they listened to skilled rhapsodes, whose dramatic delivery mesmerised audiences and earned the performers ample rewards, as we know from Plato’s Ion. I learned later, from the Preface to War Music, that Logue had undertaken the project at the ...”

“... Donald Barthelme’s​ relationship with the New Yorker began in March 1963 and hasn’t ended yet, more than thirty years after his death. Every so often one of his stories pops up on the magazine’s monthly Fiction Podcast, in which writers are asked to choose a favourite piece from the archive to read and discuss ...”

“... He is referring to the FBI.*Pornography star Stormy Daniels provides a detailed description of Donald Trump’s penis. Although Trump had bragged about the size of his member in the primary debates and in campaign speeches, Daniels, based on her professional expertise, laughingly refutes this.*Hurricane Florence causes basins containing more than two ...”

“... been away to boarding-school. Amongst my year my only companion in these disadvantages was Donald Swann, the musician. A science teacher, who had the schoolmaster’s eye for the frailties of those whom he was supposed to teach, called us ‘the Swollheim’. The name allowed massive economies in sarcasm. Two attempts to prepare me for my new life were ...”

“... and subsequently in business journalism. Unlike Fleming’s previous biographer John Pearson, Donald McCormick makes no attempt to psychologise his subject – or to reproduce the fluency which made Pearson’s book read as easily as a James Bond thriller. His justification is to produce, among much that is already ...”

“... tiny and helpless. These fashions seem to beg interpretation, but Fruits offers little, and while Donald Richie’s Image Factory promises an ‘appreciation’ of the ‘inherent meanings’ in ‘Japanese fads, fashions and styles’, readers will search in vain for insights. When he isn’t simply describing the various cultural phenomena he observes in ...”

“... time. I began it by rereading Camus and then The Betrothed by Manzoni, which I had never read. I wanted to know about plagues that were worse than ours, so I could sigh with relief. At least we were not going to die with huge purple boils and buboes on our groins and under our arms, dead rats and fleas beneath our feet. Just a stifling ...”

“... travel, ban you from committees, and find other ways to ruin your career.’ But then Meadows read Lynne Olson’s book Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power in 1940 and Helped to Save Britain (2007). He ‘felt a flash of recognition’: Boehner was Neville Chamberlain, autocratic and obstinate, but willing to suck up to ...”

“... 24 hours he spent at home in Câmpina. It’s possible that his parents invoked this rule when Donald argued for the things he wanted to take with him.Until my father​ boarded the steamer at Constanţa, just shy of his tenth birthday, all the journeys he’d taken had been completed within a day or a fraction of a day – in the car to the holiday ...”

“... with that vote of thanks, at a Congress of Genetics in Stockholm Medawar spoke with Dr Hugh Donald, who was engaged in research on cattle twins. Donald had been trying to clarify the exact distinction between identical twins (so-called because they result from the division of one egg) and fraternal ones (so-called ...”

“... investor customers are people’s savings and pension funds. Flash Boys has been widely read as a morality play, a story of evil-doing high-frequency traders. But it can just as easily be read as an account of banks that either wouldn’t, or didn’t know how to, take best care of their own or their ...”

“... numbers, how they actually do their financial reckoning. An ethnoaccountant couldn’t just read the rule book, even though it exists in the form of GAAP, the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles of the Financial Accounting Standards Board. The ethnoaccountant has to be a Wittgensteinian. In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein pointed to ...”

“... than they could normally expect, simply because of their supposedly ‘human’ qualities. Donald Trump – a ludicrous figure, but at least he’s lived it up a bit in the real world and at least he’s worked out how to cover 90 per cent of his skull with 30 per cent of his hair. Warren Beatty – a beaming former Adonis who has significantly ...”