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“... poems she’d written since, it turned out that the early poem was the only one any of them had read, and this because it was the one that their tutor, who was present, had photocopied from an anthology and distributed among them. Such things happen on the reading-circuit, as I can attest. And one marvels at what authors will put up with for the sake of a ...”

“... Donald Mitchell recalls that Benjamin Britten had a low opinion of music critics in newspapers. Alan Blyth’s compilation Remembering Britten would have done little to make him change his mind: it is a book fundamentally misconceived and often grotesque in execution. The tributary volume of memoirs, such as the one Stephen Spender compiled after Auden’s death, has the value not only of illuminating its subject but of providing a complex shading of reaction and relation through the personalities of the contributors ...”

“... forces have not been rebuilt.’ On 11 September 2001, six hours after the attacks, I heard that Donald Rumsfeld said that it might be an opportunity to ‘hit’ Iraq. I heard that he said: ‘Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.’ I heard that Condoleezza Rice asked: ‘How do you capitalise on these opportunities?’ I heard that on 17 ...”

“... Rabelais, the point that is being made. The far from Rabelaisian texts that Browning subsequently read – David Strauss’s and Renan’s Lives of Jesus, for instance – are more to the taste of A.S. Byatt, but they supplied the poet with no comparable occasions for displaying the exuberance of artifice. Moreover this art, pushed so intransigently under our ...”

“... of beasts was impossible.’ After McCrindle’s fence has been tightened, the company boss Donald sends the men on a job to a featureless area of Hereford and Worcester. Their days follow a pattern: they put up fences with numbing slowness, stop for cigarette breaks, eat, go to the pub and then retire to their dingy caravan. This procedure is ...”

“... Donald Davie is already known for – among many other things – his striking comments on the hymns of Watts and Wesley in A Gathered Church: The Literature of the English Dissenting Interest 1700-1930 (1978). Now he has devoted an entire book to the hymn in 18th-century England – or rather, as the title indicates, he is trying to define a specific genre or set of modes and tones that constitute ‘the 18th-century hymn ...”

“... The​ most enduring blight left behind by Donald Trump, long after he has smashed things up, will be the pile of books devoted to trying to make sense of him. It will grow after investigative journalists have spent years diving for hidden records, exploring subterranean corporations and foreign partners but never reaching the dark ocean bottom ...”

“... him as the only check on the theoretically infinite number of meanings that, in his view, can be read out of any given text. One such institution, plainly, is the Church; another, he argues, is the university, or, at any given time in relation to any given discipline, ‘the academic community’. In her rejoinder Helen Gardner resumes her tone as the ...”

“... adventurer searching out the furthermost reaches of life. But to anybody familiar with the case of Donald Crowhurst and, more particularly, with The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall, published in 1970, Stone’s book raises increasingly uncomfortable questions about when fair use of ...”

“... conceptualising, he never lost touch with sensuous perception. In ‘Nude in a Fountain’ we read: Light perches, preening, on the handle of a pram And gasps on paths and runs along a rail And whitely, brightly in a soft diffusion Veils and unveils the naked figure, pale As marble in her stone and stilled confusion. In such lines, where the abstraction ...”

“... break the narrative flow. Nevertheless, Engineering the Revolution is a triumph. It deserves to be read widely, and not just as an inquiry into the origins of modern France, with its distinctive combination of capitalism, relatively small-scale production, and state-led technocracy. As Alder says, ‘until we understand the development of science and ...”

“... each other, not assessing or criticising each other’s work, not building on it. If they even read each other, they would have to do so indiscriminately and thus inefficiently, for they couldn’t draw on the social knowledge that tells them which authors are worth reading and which are cranks, whose results can be relied on and whose should be viewed ...”

“... Donald Justice, who died in August 2004 at the age of 78, was one of the most subtle and enchanting American poets of his generation. In ‘Variations on a text by Vallejo’, a poem anticipating his own demise, but written some three decades before it, he pictured gravediggers burying him in Miami (his home town): And one of them put his blade into the earth To lift a few clods of dirt, the black marl of Miami, And scattered the dirt, and spat, Turning away abruptly, out of respect ...”

“... The crucial moment was in September 2000, when a contact in Dallas phoned Chanos to ask if he had read an article in the Wall Street Journal by a journalist called Jonathan Weil, who specialised in accounting. Much of the profit being recorded by energy companies such as Enron, Weil reported, came from their estimates of the current market value of contracts ...”

“... be sad? Should we be bothered? Writing in the LRB just over twenty years ago, the near-omniscient Donald Davie pre-empted these questions and delivered a cruel judgment. Davie was reviewing Enright’s Collected Poems, and was both pertinent and impertinent in his comments, a combination characteristic both of petty gods and of literary critics trained in the ...”