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“... had ‘so little of the savage’ that when he and Lord Mulgrave ‘sat with their backs to the light’ Johnson ‘was afraid to speak to either, lest I should mistake one for the other’. Omai was a fashionable object of wonder, a kind of Pygmalion’s freak, but Johnson’s response to him was in exact and literal conformity with his principled views on ...”

“... interpret these things. We are also familiar with the idea, developed powerfully in philosophy by Donald Davidson, that we could not come to understand these people without building into our interpretation at a structural level some assumptions about the ways in which their experience and thoughts resemble ours: that we must interpret what they say, for ...”

“... moved like spirits in an airy loom,’ Cecil Lewis recalled, ‘where wind and cloud and light wove day and night long the endless fabric of the changing sky.’ Fernald, who aspired to be a writer like his father, contrasted the sordid battlefield below with ‘the blue sky dazzling in its radiance, and the horizon a glorious mixture of yellow, red ...”

“... he wasn’t praising him for any Eliotic or iconoclastic talents, which is part of the reason for Donald Davie’s complaint a few years later that Hardy represented ‘a crucial selling short of the poetic vocation, for himself and his successors’. The Larkin-Davie standoff oversimplifies matters, as Robert Lowell intimated when he said that the two poets ...”

“... or altered, to cast certain members of his entourage, who now occupy very high office, in a bad light. As far as I can ascertain, few people wanted to stop after Khorramshahr. Casualties – at most, sixty thousand Iranian dead – were sustainable. People were convinced that force could be used to export the Revolution. Israel’s invasion of South Lebanon ...”

“... Schoenbergian. Not that the classical tradition had been exactly ignored or unappreciated here. Donald Tovey, dying in 1940, had built up since the turn of the century a body of commentary covering exactly the same field, and comparable, too, in being predominantly occasional – programme notes, encyclopedia entries, contributions to symposia and so ...”

“... and the oligarchs who gained ownership of privatised assets.When the media want to discuss whether Donald Trump is a fascist, whether Brexit is an imperialist project or the way pandemics end, historians will be among the experts consulted. The public intellectual in the English-speaking world who has offered the most expansive sociological analyses of the ...”

“... even ordinary relationships emotionally unmanageable: the wife of her Oxford philosophy tutor Donald MacKinnon made him stop seeing her; a crisis in her feelings for Anscombe caused her to destroy seven pages of her journals.Foot and Murdoch shared a flat in London and became very close, but drama followed. Foot had been having an affair with the ...”

“... by a blessed ‘St Gugg’ fellowship. While in England she made influential friends such as Donald Hall and the Plath-Hugheses, and published in the New Yorker. Katharine White, the poetry editor, soon offered her a first-read agreement.In the meantime, Rich had broken off her engagement to Sumner Powell, a Wasp Harvard boy, and fallen in love with the ...”

“... no more real . . .’ ends with the lyrical iambic pentameter, ‘I feel the glass collide with light and day’), but it is impossible to judge what effect was intended. Dylan Thomas may have been happy to intone the poems at his reading (they are remarkably sonorous), but their difficulty prompted unenthusiastic reviews, including Hugh MacDiarmid’s ...”

“... are hymns and psalm paraphrases as well as jokey university elegies, grand pastoral effusions, light-fingered Italian sonnets (delightfully translated for the Oxford edition by Andrew McNeillie), Ovidian neo-Latin elegies, two of the best answer poems in English (‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’), a masque and two of the best neo-Latin elegies ever ...”

“... in Iraq. Nor were the mental blinkers restricted to the field operatives. On 10 September 2001, Donald Rumsfeld announced to a Pentagon audience: ‘Today we declare war on bureaucracy.’ This ‘war on bureaucracy’, inspired in part by Friedman, meant that virtually no effort was made to rebuild the shattered administrative and regulatory machinery in ...”

“... a press conference and announced that they would be suing the agency. Ford’s chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, was alerted to the danger by his deputy, Dick Cheney. The Olsons received a settlement of $750,000 in exchange for dropping their legal action, and were invited to the White House, where Ford made them a public apology.As the Rockefeller report ...”

“... for the New Yorker in which she somewhat mournfully observed that, following the election of Donald Trump, ‘the personal-essay boom is over’: ‘Individual perspectives do not, at the moment, seem like a trustworthy way to get to the bottom of a subject.’ She sticks her Facebook profile into the book anyway, though regular readers of her work will ...”

“... features Jair Bolsonaro, Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan, Boris Johnson, Marine Le Pen, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. The idea that US supremacy is seen as being ordained by divine providence is underlined by an episode showing American presidents speaking the words ‘So help me God’ when reciting the Oath of Office, immediately followed by an account of the ...”