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“... 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 ...”

“... Mitchell is fond of quoting Leonard Cohen – ‘there is a crack in everything/that’s how the light gets in’ – and he writes movingly of what his son taught him about creativity and compassion before his death by suicide. Hidden Valley Road is something else: a horror story, expertly told, about a family in which everyone suffers, and no one improves ...”

“... are sculptural as much as architectural – the architect quotes American minimalists like Donald Judd as influences – and while the scale of the big front room is Gersaint-like, the display is not. Galleries which deal in contemporary modern art tend to follow the style of the public galleries, which space it out and seclude you and the work within ...”

“... on her way to becoming a breast cancer researcher’; the love story of Shyamala and Donald Harris, a graduate student in economics, ‘while participating in the civil rights movement’ and despite her family’s expectations that she return to India and an arranged marriage; the birth of Kamala and her sister, Maya; the marches they went on ...”

“... What sort of a poet is Donald Davie? The factual answer, as with all poets, is to be found only in a volume such as the Collected Poems which he now lays before the public, but Davie himself appears to have worried more than most practitioners about what kind of poetry he was writing and – if one can put it that way – about the politics of style ...”

“... 24 hours he spent at home in Câmpina. It’s possible that his parents invoked this rule when Donald argued for the things he wanted to take with him.Until my father​ boarded the steamer at Constanţa, just shy of his tenth birthday, all the journeys he’d taken had been completed within a day or a fraction of a day – in the car to the holiday ...”

“... a judgment or a conspiracy, and flags were never far away.After leaving the Walter Reed hospital, Donald Trump was swiftly encouraging people to risk their own lives and one another’s, just as he had done. Even by his standards his tweet was dangerous and mad. Then he ripped off his mask on the White House balcony, as if in defiance – but of what, or ...”

“... All his life Donald Winnicott took great pains to present himself as an orthodox Freudian. Yet few ‘Freudians’ have been more radical in their departures from orthodoxy. Winnicott’s central ideas about mothers and infants, about nurture and cure, about the authenticity of self, are evocative and powerful, but they are nonetheless heresy ...”

“... than a ceramic one. His favourite candle-lit restaurant in Kyoto was now flooded with electric light. The West had brought to Japan a pervasive electric glare; a proliferation of shiny white surfaces in league with the rude light. And it was remorselessly sweeping out the shadows and mystery accumulated during Japan’s ...”

“... Variorum: A Defence of Heresy and Heretics’, the American poet Ed Dorn honours Donald Davie’s penultimate collection of poems, To Scorch or Freeze (1989), as ‘the most economical rebuke ... this age in moral free-fall is likely to get’. It is Davie’s most experimental poetry book: a series of religious meditations based on the ...”

“... philosophy, has edited the proceedings of the 1984 Rutgers conference on the philosophy of Donald Davidson. The scale of that conference is reflected in the size of this volume, which contains 28 substantial papers. And this is but half the story: a companion volume of similar size, drawn from the same conference, and dealing with Davidson’s essays ...”

“... They were no more sickening in 2003 than they had been twenty years before, at a time when Donald (‘I don’t do diplomacy’) Rumsfeld was shaking Saddam diplomatically by the hand in Baghdad. To pretend now that the evidence of institutional cruelty is some sort of revelation is outrageous, meant as it clearly is to expunge, as we shudder, memories ...”

“... the little green alluvial tracts at glen-mouths where families lived before the evictions. In 1988 Donald MacLean of Howmore, fisherman and lighthouse boatman, and his wife Jill told me about life on this coast, ‘the back of the hill’ behind the 2000-foot peaks of Hecla and Beinn Mhor. I had hoped to meet them again this week – I wrote to them in ...”

“... or a Paul Bowles. No one has had a greater yearning or been better qualified to fill this gap than Donald Richie. ‘Almost everything I do, everything that is known about me, is connected to this country,’ he wrote. ‘To be a person so intent upon describing a place not his own – isn’t this odd?’ Over sixty years in Japan, he has been a ...”

“... surgeons, Ott and Jakobson – desperate measures in 1902, when abdominal surgery was no light matter. The miscarriage seemed a horrible fulfilment of a bad omen at a wild party held in the theatre at the end of January: the actors slid down waxed boards; the actor Kachalov fought a boxing match in drag – pink tricot and high heels; Chaliapin sent ...”