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“... Life?’Admittedly, the gamesome poet is often a rather ponderous creature (‘Auden Ludens’, as Donald Davie pointed out, was often ‘Auden in short pants, acting the little horror’). But his vision of other people playing rarely feels actorly, and it takes us close to the centre of what art meant for him. In a lecture on ‘Poetry and Freedom’, given ...”

“... include every approach or outlook in a work of joint scholarship, the omission is still odd in the light of T.H. Aston‘s long service as editor of Past and Present, that French-inspired, Oxford-produced academic journal, featuring articles on the interconnections between structures, society and belief systems. While the methods of intellectual history are ...”

“... characteristically, as a collection of disconnected bits and pieces, which can be used to cast a light-hearted sense of discrepancy over the contemporary scene. England turns out to be an old curiosity shop disintegrating among the gleaming hangars of a brand new retail park. McKie is the grizzled proprietor, momentarily bringing past and present together to ...”

“... is like selling citizens a part of themselves. In the AMC series Mad Men the central character, Donald Draper, is a senior creative at Sterling Cooper, a top-flight Madison Avenue advertising firm in the early 1960s. What was his grounding for this station? He was a car salesman in a former life, with the stress on former life, and a different man ...”

“... a retired admiral who had served as Bush's deputy director at the CIA; and, to a lesser extent, Donald Gregg, Bush’s national security adviser and another veteran of CIA covert operations. Moreau’s team mostly worked out of a room near the National Military Command Centre on the ground floor of the Pentagon. They could also unobtrusively man a desk or ...”

“... that will give you all the hell you could want.‘Horror starts, like charity, at home,’ as Donald Davie put it, and the phrase could stand as epigraph to much of Waugh, especially his masterpiece of tangled modernism and barbarity, A Handful of Dust (1934). This time the protagonist is Basil’s anti-type, someone who is doomed from the start: Tony ...”

“... followed. To feed and house the uninvited newcomers halfway decently, and find them jobs in new light industries was a splendid achievement; but it brought the risk that, if open politics were permitted, Hong Kong would split ungovernably along Chinese civil war lines, with one side’s backers holding the tap on Hong Kong’s daily water supply. Two ...”

“... thought since the war. There he quickly found a local mentor in Marcel Gauchet, a leading light of the anti-totalitarian galaxy of the 1980s who by that time had become a critic of the promotion of human rights to a central position in democratic thought. In 1999 van Middelaar published the result of his labours in the Netherlands, Politicide: De ...”

“... when ‘the Movement’ was first identified, a group of writers that included Amis, Larkin, Wain, Donald Davie, Robert Conquest and others. As J.D. Scott put it in the baptismal piece in the Spectator, ‘The Movement, as well as being anti-phoney, is anti-wet; sceptical, robust, ironic, prepared to be as comfortable as possible.’ Amis in particular had, as ...”

“... while the commercial stations did the real job of entertaining with their serials, dance bands, light classics and jazz. Johnson writes from a worked-out position, clearly anti-élitist and feminist: she analyses commercial radio in terms of its ideological placement of the audience as family members, and of women as family-bound. But with all that can be ...”

“... the Western world’s practice on crucial issues such as internet control and supervision.’ Donald Trump? The People’s Daily again, via Twitter this time: ‘@realdonaldtrump is right. #fakenews is the enemy. China has known this for years.’ Tiananmen was a disaster for China, no? Au contraire: in Griffiths’s words, ‘it was argued, even by those ...”

“... disclosure of a conflict of interest, he is a mere member – of the Defense Policy Board under Donald Rumsfeld. Another member of the study group was Douglas Feith, now the Pentagon’s Under Secretary for Policy. The advice that Perle, Feith and other American friends of Israel’s Likud irredentists gave Netanyahu in 1996 became the Bush ...”

“... The Autobiography found the mooted authenticity of a voice that felt like a brass-neck steal from Donald Goines’s Dopefiend or Iceberg Slim’s Trick Baby to be, at best, a balefully corny performance. On a deeper level, though, that voice hints at all sorts of unresolved tensions and uncomfortable truths about jazz and its place in postwar American ...”

“... clowns with sharky grins poking their thumbs at us from screens and hoardings. In Smart City, Donald Trump is a good thing. He makes the faultline visible. The gold-topped King Ubu of the internet has been generous enough to embody all the creeping horrors of corporate opportunism, all the self-serving, reflex mendacity of political operators with a more ...”

“... I wish this was an augury for (or rather against) Brexit. All of us are Remainers which, in the light of her generosity, we feel later that we ought to have said.30 August, Paris. Today a contrary experience. With Rupert at the flea market I walk down the rue de Rennes for my lunch at Deux Magots. Nobody sitting inside, the terrace crowded out. I have a ...”