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“... find the old semiological fallacies enduring uninterrupted. This can be seen at once from reading Donald Preziosi’s The Semiotics of the Built Environment, which puts forward a theory of the significance of architectural forms. This theory, where intelligible, is palpably erroneous, consisting in a renewed iteration of the fallacy that sequential ...”

“... relationship shapes the very documents which purport to describe it. Unlike Margaret King, Donald Queller does not hesitate for a moment between the rival interpretations of the Venetian patriciate. According to him, the open book held by the winged lion of St Mark ‘is really a palimpsest’. ‘Beneath the official inscription, Pax tibi ...”

“... presents himself as similarly disturbed by tragedy’s unfairness: It will be many years before I read again Of the death of Cordelia, Or indeed (though he deserves cuffing) Of the Macduff boy’s stabbing. ‘Poetical Justice’ is a dry, witty exploration of one of Enright’s most characteristic dilemmas: art’s responsibility to life. In his discussion ...”

“... but only if solution might stay unrequited. The writer, Ivan Bunin, said that Chekhov loved to read out random oddities from the newspapers: ‘Babkin, a Samara merchant, left all his money for a memorial to Hegel!’ (Chebutykin, in Three Sisters, does the same, noting that ‘Balzac got married in Berdichev’.) The attraction of such tales, one ...”

“... The name Donald Francis Tovey (always rather pompously in full) used to typify, before career musicology swept all before it, the broadly cultured rather than narrowly scholarly writer on music, sometimes browbeating and always unashamedly didactic, avid to improve his readers’ minds, popularising without condescension or dumbing down ...”

“... Anne Maclean, two lecturers in philosophy at the University College of Swansea, when they first read the dissertation in 1989. They reckoned that half of it had been copied out of books. Yet, they discovered to their horror, the lucky student had got his MA without a viva or a word of criticism. Something was plainly wrong in the university’s Centre for ...”

“... School in the Point district of Lewis, remembers the small boy as humorous but extremely shy. He read and imitated Keats, Scott and Shelley, won a scholarship to the Nicolson Institute in Stornoway, went on to Aberdeen University and became an inspiring schoolteacher, but his shyness stayed for a good deal of his adult life, and he remained ...”

“... I subscribed to Power Slam magazine and dreamed of writing for it (alas, the path not taken). I read autobiographies by the greats, a wearying number of whom had found God. I read Mick Foley’s diabolical novel. I listened to John Cena’s worse rap album. When the Sun and the Daily Star carried wrestling columns at the ...”

“... out as an independent nation’. Ransom had recruited scholars and writers like Roger Shattuck, Donald Carne-Ross, William Arrowsmith and others who would have been more likely to land in the Ivy League or the great state universities. So Middleton wasn’t wanting for company. The poet David Wevill was a long-time friend and neighbour. The brilliant ...”

“... that Martines makes much of; for the part between the scourge and the fire you have to go to Donald Weinstein’s Savonarola and Florence, past thirty years old and as fresh as ever. Desmond Seward does not take Savonarola for a millenarian either, on the grounds that he was too orthodox a Catholic: when he said he would make the Florentines rich, he ...”

“... less clear what he takes the unifying thread to be. The eponymous theme of Incomplete Nature, if I read it right, is that, in each case, ‘ententional’ explanations must appeal to things that aren’t there. We’re told that since ‘all ententional phenomena are intrinsically organised with respect to some property or state of affairs that does not ...”

“... with its dreamlike logic and unpredictability, its mingling of disparate images. In 1960, Donald Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry (Olson, Duncan, Creeley et al), hit him like a bolt of lightning. Up until then he had been under the sway of the 1957 anthology New Poets of England and America, full of Lowell, Wilbur, Larkin, Hughes – all ...”

“... A familiar feeling. I was sent the script and the book the film was based on within hours. I read both in a night. The next day, at the office, Harvey never showed up. He was driving upstate as I thrashed out an uninspired voiceover with an incredibly experienced playwright for a presumably fired writer’s film in an office staffed by attractive young ...”

“... allowed to infest the throne-room, Morris develops a mild form of megalomania. It is ghastly to read him when he takes credit for leaving the Bosnians to their fate, or for covering up for Boris Yeltsin, or for liberating Haiti, or for building a bridge (to coin a phrase) to Richard Nixon. It is ghastlier still to reflect on the germ of truth that lurks in ...”

“... parliament building. ‘Buying a Trainspotting postcode in 1996 was a solid investment,’ I read the other day in the Scotsman. Prices in Leith, apparently, have risen more than 200 per cent. How did they keep this going through the collapse of RBS and HBOS, not to mention the tanking oil price, on the slide even before the independence referendum in ...”