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“... is one of those poets who make the writing of poetry into the subject of the poems they write,’ Donald Davie noted with some scepticism. ‘The commonsense view is that this drastically limits the importance and interest of what they write; and I think this is true.’ But Graham could conceive nothing more important or interesting:To be always alone is ...”

“... I think there’s more to that argument than Jones allows. The attempts of a leader like Donald Trump to ban Muslims from entering the US, or to build a wall on the border with Mexico, are more about racism and identity than they are about economics or security. And by focusing on the geographical border, Jones neglects the way in which immigration ...”

“... Bryan Carsberg of Oftel smiles up in soft brown light as he dangles in the mirror on a green office wall. Michael Meyer of Emess Lighting is dissected by the blinds that cut across him and then reassembled from outside – his shirtsleeved figure looming like a target in the formulaic eye of some Hollywood assassin ...”

“... a means for better understanding the conservative cause to which Genovese is devoted and shedding light on those aspects of the past – the Southern past especially – that have been long neglected. Genovese’s own past is an unconventional one for a chiefly regional historian. Unlike many other historians of the American South, he was not born, reared and ...”

“... bluebells? There are further guest appearances by Proust, Freud, Virginia Woolf, Ramsay Mac Donald, Winston Churchill and other ‘stars’, and it is not every pair of Cockney youngsters who travel to France, as Amos and Zak do, in a laundry-basket full of General Haig’s underpants. All this is good fun, but the dialogue is sometimes inexcusably ...”

“... that you can’t take your eyes off him; everything he does is full of sleaze and interest. Donald Sutherland, by contrast, as the top military man who, off the record, confirms all of Garrison’s darkest and most far-reaching suspicions, merely oozes complacency: it is so satisfying to think your President has been murdered in a plot involving all the ...”

“... a psephologist, aren’t you?’ the Queen once said to the great American political sociologist, Donald Stokes, who collaborated with Butler in the Sixties and Seventies. To which Stokes, who was fond of telling the story, replied: ‘Absolutely not, ma’am.’ Impressed by the Nuffield studies, French political scientists based at Sciences Po (the Ecole ...”

“... the pluck and slop of brackish water as the signs button down snugly on their referents, whereas Donald Davie’s words stand at a chaster distance from his meanings. This, needless to say, is linguistic nonsense. Basil Bunting’s words are no closer to his material objects than Thomas Hardy’s, for all that the former came from the North-East and the ...”

“... other proxies, such as Israel and Iraq, though with little success. Giving Israel the green light to destroy the PLO led to the Lebanon debacle in 1982. Cynically supporting Saddam Hussein in his war of aggression against the mullahs in Tehran led to pointless slaughter. Each of these episodes opened a door through which US forces entered the region. In ...”

“... of 1960, Epoch, a quarterly published at Cornell, carried ‘The River Jordan’, a story by ‘Donald R. DeLillo’. It tells of a day in the life of Emil Burke, a mad Manhattan septuagenarian who leads a storefront chapel called the Psychic Church of the Crucified Christ, with a congregation of four. In the morning he descends to the Times Square subway ...”

“... in the Lowlands and had been a schoolteacher before rising to the rank of major in the Highland Light Infantry during the Second World War. He was also a pillar of the Kirk. A glowering – and sometimes snide – authoritarianism was second nature to Ross, who ran Scotland in the manner of a brusque, no-nonsense dominie. His ignorant charges included most ...”

“... for Lockheed products) and head of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Another member was Donald Rumsfeld. Reappointed defence secretary by Bush in 2001, Rumsfeld paid tribute to Andrew Marshall and announced that he would effect ‘transformation’ on the Pentagon. This provoked resistance: the military leadership had no objection to receiving more ...”

“... of Guantanamo Bay. Plato and Spinoza saw it as a realm of illusion, to be contrasted with the pure light of reason. Jacques Derrida deeply disliked the notion, suspecting it of dark metaphysical tendencies. For William Blake, from whom Martin Jay takes the title of his absorbing new study, experience is a domain of false consciousness and fruitless desire. For ...”

“... Gray is actually someone who is receptive to new evidence and prepared to revise his views in the light of it. Other, more consistent ideologues have come and gone, consigned to irrelevance by their obvious intransigence in the face of events. Gray remains, a bellwether for Thatcher’s children. This gives Black Mass a certain indicatory value. It was long a ...”

“... Mr Kalugin looked as if he had been dreamed up in an Ian Fleming nightmare. His idea of light conversation, since I decided to ask him about some of the books under review, was to hint that he could say a lot if he chose. ‘Your Kim Philby ... ha, ha, ha, that’s quite another story ... Yuri Modin – well, he’s a character ...’ and so on. I ...”