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“... broker between rich countries and poor. These days Australia has fewer illusions. On 15 July 1977 Donald Mackay, the owner of a furniture store, walked out of a hotel bar in the New South Wales town of Griffith and simply disappeared. Next day, Mackay’s bloodstained mini-van was found in a hotel carpark. He had been crusading, almost alone, against drugs ...”

“... published a pamphlet of Peter’s. I never worked out how interested he really was in poetry. Donald Hall says that he was more interested in drinking beer than in poets. How old would he have been then? Must have been in his thirties. I never thought Oscar had opinions; he would just stroke his beard and smile.Who decided on the minimalist layout for the ...”

“... provides testimony which brings out its susceptibility to romantic and dualistic interpretation. Donald Davie has written lately in this journal: ‘Great poetry is greatly sane, greatly lucid; and insanity is as much a calamity for poets and for poetry as for other human beings and other sorts of human business.’ These are impressive words. But of ...”

“... a work that has considerable respect for Puritan movements both Established and Dissenting, Donald Davie admitted in Evangelicalism an ‘openly repressive Toryism’, and added, ‘of the philistinism of the Evangelicals there can be no doubt’. It was seemingly this illib-eral philistinism that made Wordsworth, Southey, Scott, de Quincey, Byron ...”

“... and Melodious Guile, to my mind the best of his critical books, takes its place – along with Donald Davie’s Articulate Energy and Winifred Nowottny’s The Language Poets Use – among the very few enjoyable and enriching studies of how poetry works. Where Davie discusses syntax and Nowottny diction, Hollander ...”

“... a milieu, or space, in which the standards of plain speaking were set by the redoubtable Michael Davie, who really should get back there and sort out his errant protégés as soon as possible. Good journalists should not waste time producing bad PhD theses. In the academic context there is some reason for the success of pseudo-scientific guff: emptying the ...”

“... no less disconcerting. The editor of The English Language Today prefaces Morton Bloomfield’s and Donald Davie’s essays: ‘Writing also from the point of view of a poet, Davie urges that students be taught to write correct, clear and elegant English. More liberal views are presented by Raven McDavid and Susan ...”

“... to pull the Party towards the kind of street politics which the douce and amiable leadership of Donald Dewar, the shadow Scottish Secretary of State, recoils from. A fight may be in the offing. On the other hand, if the next leader of the party is to be – as now seems the case – John Smith, that would set the seal on the dominance of Scots in the Labour ...”

“... this with an acknowledgment of the enduring political importance of the seemingly cultural. George Davie’s The Democratic Intellect (1961), which bemoaned the anglo-imitation that had ruined the generalist curriculum of Scottish universities, was a central text for later nationalists, especially the Scottish Fanonites. But, as Jackson makes clear, the claims ...”

“... out. He takes polite issue with Stead over Four Quartets, and, like Stead, traces the course of Donald Davie’s relationship with Pound as a sort of fever-chart of English Poundianism. He also includes a review of C. David Heymann’s book The Last Rower, a book Stead barely mentions, though it is relevant to a study of that political ...”

“... and uneasy. When, towards the end of Astor’s editing career, the South African journalist Donald Woods proposed a series of interviews with him, Astor suggested that the theme shouldn’t be ‘How did a rich boy come to be so idealistic?’ but ‘How did a cripple come to have some success?’ By ‘cripple’ he meant mental not physical ...”

“... he wasn’t praising him for any Eliotic or iconoclastic talents, which is part of the reason for Donald Davie’s complaint a few years later that Hardy represented ‘a crucial selling short of the poetic vocation, for himself and his successors’. The Larkin-Davie standoff oversimplifies matters, as Robert Lowell ...”