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“... to me more and more gloomy.’ So it probably turned out, though we have no sure way of telling. Donald Rayfield thinks that the tone of Victor’s last pages suggests impending suicide, but there is no record of him after his Confessions end. Even the publication of a frank sexual memoir – the best way, Rayfield rather oddly claims, ‘to focus public ...”

“... economic and military history, by Keith Thomas’s Man and the Natural World and by the work of Donald Worster and Alfred Crosby. If environmental history is quite a new development, however, environmentalism is not. In Green Imperialism Richard Grove demonstrates that modern, scientific environmentalism, and the state-sponsored programmes of conservation ...”

“... of the kind of ‘artificial reason’ fostered among common lawyers. According to Bourke, Burke read the French Revolution as an outgrowth not of genuine Enlightenment, but of a ‘spurious’ pseudo-Enlightenment founded on the dogmatic claims of deism. In this way Bourke daringly reappropriates Burke’s conservative counter-Enlightenment classic ...”

“... events of the strike itself. ‘Insight’ is easily the more careful chronicler of these events. Donald Macintyre – at the time of the strike the Sunday Times’s Labour Editor, now the Times’s Labour Editor – is among the best reporters of the day, in his own or any other field. In the course of the miners’ strike he was paid the singular compliment ...”

“... that. Schmidt means ‘Fountain’. This may be just a typo, but it’s a revealing one. If you read a lot of Jennings’s work, the poems blur into one another; there is too much repetition, too much rewriting of the same poem, too many neat little verse essays. There is a lack of rhythmical innovation; the grain of the language is often a smoother, less ...”

“... stories before doesn’t mean they’d been published, but this didn’t deter Horowitz. As he read the Newport Mercury, the Knickerbocker and Arthur’s Home Magazine, ‘slowly, among these hundreds and then thousands of stories, using a set of critical discriminators, I began to identify what I thought might be stories written by Henry James.’ He then ...”

“... One of Donald Davie’s early poems, and one of his strongest, is ‘Pushkin: A Didactic Poem’, from Brides of Reason (1955). As in Davie’s ‘Dream Forest’, Pushkin is taken as a model, a poet Who recognised no checks Yet brooked them all – a mind Molten and thereby fluent, Unforced, easily strict. In this didactic poem the speaker is professional, drawing his comparisons with rehearsed casualness: In the matter of Pushkin, Emily Brontë Is the best analogy in some ways Among our poets ...”

“... it is tremendously exciting to pick up a nationally distributed newspaper or magazine and read a review of one’s own book. This has been my happy situation for the last two weeks, during which time most quality newspapers have carried a review of my biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The impact on me has been that of saturation coverage, but that’s ...”

“... would not have been mentioned to the pupils of the primary school in Câmpina which my father, Donald Slomnicki, then seven and speaking only a smattering of Romanian, attended from the autumn of 1938. Behind every teacher in every classroom in every school loomed a portrait of the king and a map of Greater Romania, the perfect circle within ...”

“... technical intelligence. There is recent evidence that from 1976 to 1983 the KGB was able to read France’s diplomatic traffic with its Moscow embassy by bugging an embassy teleprinter which it had intercepted in transit. The main foreign priority of Soviet Intelligence today is probably the acquisition of advanced technology. According to evidence ...”

“... is more likely that the perpetrator simply never noticed. Let alone re-write, he doesn’t even re-read. He leaves the reader to do that. Try this: ‘In the mean time the Australian and New Zealand expeditionary force trained for war at their camp near Cairo, and relaxed and pursued pleasure in the cafés and low dives of Cairo …’ Is this, the reader ...”

“... you loathe tend to go in for. And certainly the writers in the group encouraged a belief that they read no language but English and hated music (except jazz) and pictures and theatres. This was largely nonsense, but it had its importance, especially for Larkin and Amis. To get the balance right, one needs to ask naively whether Amis would be the fine novelist ...”

“... and caution. To no avail, however – and perhaps understandably. On Saturday, 11 January 1986, Donald Trelford, the editor of the Observer, had spent a lot of time closeted in the paper’s fourth-floor boardroom. Outside the Observer’s premises that afternoon stood a convoy of Rolls-Royces and other opulent vehicles. I am not suggesting the Sultan ...”

“... also (and strangely, considering his origins in the neo-Augustan ‘Movement’ of the Fifties) Donald Davie, who kept the subject respectable, the interest alive. Michael Alexander suggests that ‘indifference and bafflement are today more common than hostility,’ and that may be so. But there has been some excellent work done on Pound recently: Richard ...”

“... philosophy, has edited the proceedings of the 1984 Rutgers conference on the philosophy of Donald Davidson. The scale of that conference is reflected in the size of this volume, which contains 28 substantial papers. And this is but half the story: a companion volume of similar size, drawn from the same conference, and dealing with Davidson’s essays ...”