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“... to carry out Presidential desires and protect the President from responsibility for them. Donald Regan does not remember ever meeting Oliver North; he is certain they were never alone together. That is because the compartmentalised Reagan White House not only separated domestic policy (the responsibility of the Chief of Staff) from foreign affairs ...”

“... There are not many facts available about Donald Barthelme, at least on this side of the Atlantic. He has been hailed as a leading Post-Modernist, but Post-Modernism (to the extent that it has a credo) stresses the unreliability of facts and the supremacy of fictions. He has also been viewed as a pungent satirist. One thing that can be stated is that Barthelme’s literary career has mostly been pursued in the pages of the New Yorker ...”

“... One of the finest things in Donald Davie’s Under Briggflatts is a sustained, learned and densely implicative comparison of two poems about horses: Edwin Muir’s well-known, post-Apocalypse poem ‘The Horses’ and Austin Clarke’s much less familiar ‘Forget me not’, a poem written out of Clarke’s angry response to the Irish trade in horse meat in the 1950s ...”

“... the airport late into the evening. The former congresswoman chastised me for being insufficiently read in the works of Robert Caro. We watched each other’s bags in the line to be re-ticketed and I tried to help her with the airline app on her phone. ‘I used to chair committees and have an entire staff to do these things for me,’ she said. The last ...”

“... Stewart, now editor of the East London Daily Dispatch, the paper made famous by Biko’s friend, Donald Woods. The Dispatch is housed in an old building with cast-iron Victorian balustrades around its roomy verandahs, aged wooden staircases and the sort of desk in the press room at which you stand up to read. It was, I ...”

“... morning/Is different, my dear one’), and another is so-so, but some time in the 1970s, having read Auden’s City Without Walls, Grigson wrote an Epistle in which he excelled himself: Green pillows of cress In the brook which begins us You celebrate too; And up from your verses, Though many Forget them, stinking Ogres not ...”

“... to advantage; the opportunity to loll among the palms with Jean Simmons went to the Welsh actor Donald Houston. Houston was blond and wholesome, and had a long career, much of it in B-movies; it’s interesting to think that John Osborne might have enjoyed it in his stead. Osborne as the fourth intern in Doctor in the House, alongside Dirk Bogarde, Kenneth ...”

“... that emotion works by a negative law: mere absence of aggression, distortion, haste allows us to read into things (qualified only as to texture, shade and other exact physicality) powers that favour human well-being.’ Extremely distinguished itself, in diction and (yes) cadence, this sentence is on the one hand an exceptionally exact registering of the ...”

“... Donald Davidson is perhaps the most distinguished philosopher in history never to have written a book. Indeed, he did not get round to writing articles until he was into his forties (he is now 76). Yet those articles – short, intense, allusive, hard – have changed the shape of contemporary analytical philosophy ...”

“... and was now clucking around the opening show wondering if perhaps the galvanised iron relief by Donald Judd wouldn’t have looked better over there, where the green lacquered one was. The two things that struck me most forcefully about him were his innocence – he had, after all, agreed to speak to me ‘off the record’ despite all the horrible ...”

“... opportunities. The fax was posted almost immediately on the Internet and seems to have been read as evidence of desperation. The nervousness of the markets crystallised as fear of LTCM’s failure. Almost no one could be persuaded to buy, at any reasonable price, an asset that LTCM was known or believed to hold, because of the concern that the markets ...”

“... the modern history of science’s careful avoidance of evaluation, Machine Dreams will sometimes read as Whig history with the assessments swapped: the past told as chronicle of the path to what Mirowski considers the gigantic error that is mainstream modern economics. His alienation from the mainstream may also account for an interesting implicit ...”

“... Zero, the proposed tallest building in the world. I saw a headline in the Los Angeles Times that read: ‘After Levelling City, US Tries to Build Trust.’ I heard that military personnel were now carrying ‘talking point’ cards with phrases such as: ‘We are a values-based, people-focused team that strives to uphold the dignity and respect of all.’ I ...”

“... outskirts of Moscow, when they buried Kim Philby. Guy Burgess had died in 1963, Anthony Blunt and Donald Maclean in 1983. Philby, however, was still alive when I started work in Moscow as the Independent’s correspondent there in early 1987, and his presence was a source of recurrent nightmares. Naturally I had put out feelers for an interview, but they led ...”

“... Jones’s Archway (a sculpture in the Heathrow Hilton, Ballard’s favourite London building), you read that ‘sitting in its atrium one becomes, briefly, a more advanced kind of human being. Within this remarkable building one could never fall in love, or need to.’ Even when the overlap between a work and anything Ballard wrote is accidental, or ...”