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“... banks or fuel poverty, without a bedroom tax or two-child benefit cap, Boris Johnson or Brexit, Donald Trump or Tommy Robinson; without a public sector staffing crisis, crumbling hospitals, collapsing schools or overcrowded prisons. Most important of all, for readers looking for an alternative reality in September 2020, it’s also a world without ...”

“... said’. Like time, it collaborates only with silence, always invoked in Larkin’s poetic medium. Donald Davie has an expressive metaphor for the other kind of poetry, in a poem aptly entitled ‘Ars Poetica’: Walk quietly around in A space cleared for the purpose. Most poems, or the best, Describe their own birth, and this Is what they are – a space ...”

“... not-so-hallucinatory scenarios of the steps to apocalypse, while the sabre-rattlers-in-chief – Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un – trade insults like schoolchildren locked in a brawl. Of course the threat of nuclear war never vanished. All that went away was the bipolar conflict with the Soviet Union, the theatre in which we feared the war would erupt. As ...”

“... a need for hope in Americans and in others, and much of that hope died with him. There is, as D.M. Thomas’s novel suggests, continuing disbelief – it can’t have happened, it is a bad dream or a mere movie, reality will pick up and go on again. There is the mythological investment in the Kennedys as a doomed dynasty, a notion which also appears in ...”

“... who had ruined everything, the bane of virtuous Queen Katherine, virtually the murderer of saintly Thomas More. For Protestants, she was, formally at least, the rootstock of their Reformation, and to be honoured as such. But mud sticks, and, after all, it was not the likes of Thomas More but the sacred monarch himself who ...”

“... the Houses of Parliament have been repurposed as a store for dung, while in Utopia itself, Thomas More specifies that Utopians use gold, which is abundant, for chamber pots. Shit, like nothing, happens anywhere, these utopian writers seem to say, but what matters is keeping it localised. Utopia is now five hundred years old. First published in Leuven ...”

“... of the title is that the United States is currently missing a president in an all too real sense: Donald Trump is an impostor, an aberration, unfit for office. ‘If I have to lose this office to protect this country,’ Duncan says at one point, ‘I will do it.’ The difference between him and Trump couldn’t be made more glaring. (Duncan also does a lot ...”

“... do. His arguments depend on a view of psychological concepts that he shares with Wittgenstein and Donald Davidson: We identify what different people think, believe and perceive in ways that are as rich and complex as our conception of the nonpsychological world onto which those thoughts, beliefs, and perceptions are directed . . . we who inhabit the world ...”

“... anti-communism after reading Elinor Lipper’s Gulag memoir. Having recruited the US congressman Donald Judd and the Catholic priest Daniel Lyons, Liebman travelled to Taipei and helped draft the league’s agenda; at the league’s 1974 conference William F. Buckley gave the keynote address. And then there was John Singlaub, a retired general and another of ...”

“... with the authority of the Apostle Bartholomew.’ Others thought the Buddha a decayed memory of Thomas the Apostle, who was said to have gone to India after the Resurrection. Some assumed the Buddhists were a branch of the Nestorian Christians who, exiled from Constantinople in the fifth century, had fled to Persia and later flourished in Tang Dynasty China ...”

“... reminiscence. A vivid presence in Dublin in the 1950s was the ‘morally intimidating’ Donald Davie, then a fellow at Trinity College, where Donoghue would drop in on him to discuss modern poetry. ‘He used the word “infidel”,’ Donoghue remembers, ‘more freely and more deliberately than I supposed it had ever been used since the 17th ...”

“... Pascal, Rossetti and Mérimée, and includes some distinctly obscure pieces, such as an essay on Thomas Browne which is a small-scale masterpiece.The conventional image of Pater as a narrow aesthete or fastidious connoisseur is contradicted by these volumes. What emerges instead is a man of formidable learning and intellectual scope, a polyglot in modern as ...”

“... the gauche Uncle Tannous (a diminutive of Antonius/Anthony) on a weekly sitcom called The Danny Thomas Show. Danny Thomas was the son of Maronite Christian immigrants from Kahlil Gibran’s village, Becharre, in north Lebanon. His assimilation was so thorough that he took the Al Jolson role of cantor’s son in a 1952 ...”

“... is one of those poets who make the writing of poetry into the subject of the poems they write,’ Donald Davie noted with some scepticism. ‘The commonsense view is that this drastically limits the importance and interest of what they write; and I think this is true.’ But Graham could conceive nothing more important or interesting:To be always alone is ...”

“... Writing a BBC Third Programme review of Donald Hall’s Penguin Contemporary American Poetry exactly a month before she killed herself early in 1963, Sylvia Plath praised ‘the inwardness of these images ... the uncanny faculty of melting through the leaves of the wallpaper, through the dark looking-glass, into a world which one can only call surrealist and irrational ...”