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“... regulation or other, consciously or otherwise, or taking advantage of an illegality by others. Donald Thomas’s book reminds a reader that had he been a retired colonel living in Brighton in 1942, and invited an actress from London down for the weekend, he could have been smartly fined and threatened with imprisonment next time. The reason? The ...”

“... At the end of a recent and refreshingly untypical poem R.S. Thomas, recalling his sea-captain father, addresses him where he lies in his grave:               And I, can I accept your voyages are done; that there is no tide high enough to float you off this mean shoal of plastic and trash? We have heard something like this before, in more reverberant metre: But thrown upon this filthy modern tide And by its formless spawning fury wrecked ...”

“... and rancour. There is evidence that he enjoys walking, curlews, turtledoves, bullfinches, owls, Thomas Moore’s ‘Thee, Thee, Only Thee’ and much that France still offers. There are writers he likes, most of them dead: Ronsard, John Clare, William Barnes (‘love of whose poems seems to me a litmus paper of the genuine’), Auden (‘the greatest of my ...”

“... fact of being everywhere a foreigner was probably an assistance to his native wit.’ And Donald Davie, who everywhere has his native wits about him, has he profited much from living abroad? In half-praise of George Steiner, Davie floats ‘a tradition of high-flying speculation about literature, which we costive islanders cannot afford not to profit ...”

“... and John Whitworth; from Aidan Carl Mathews (another besides ‘Severances’); from Thomas Shapcott (who may be Australian – we aren’t told) and from Peter Bland (probably, by the same token, a New Zealander); and from U. A. Fanthorpe (two). One of the Fanthorpe poems gets, reasonably enough, the third prize of £500, Bland gets ...”

“... without fanfare. As yet, few have picked up on an analysis by the New York University economist Thomas Philippon of the history of the unit cost of financial intermediation. The unit cost is a measure of the efficiency of the financial system, and Philippon tracks its level in the United States since 1884, the time of pens and paper ledgers, when a ...”

“... nostalgia need not imply a desire simply to flee the bewildering present, to go back home, as Thomas Wolfe put it, ‘to the escapes of Time and Memory’: the historian’s purpose in going home is to recover something left there, some knowledge or power or psychic condition which, brought back to the present, can help us all to feel more at home in this ...”

“... was Galloway’s observation that he met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times that Donald Rumsfeld did; ‘the difference is Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and maps.’ As Ali G might ...”

“... Seely and set as verse. Most of the poems in Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld (Simon and Schuster, £8.99) are short enough to be sent by text message. Here’s ‘In the Red Sea’: The Red Sea begins and ends. And then there’s an area Just beyond the Red Sea, And it may very well be That people choose to do it ...”

“... as much sense as broadcasting Singin’ in the Rain on the wireless: you’d still get to hear Donald O’Connor singing ‘Make ’em Laugh’, but it’s not quite the same if you can’t see him walking along the piano keys, dancing with the headless dummy and running up the walls. But that hasn’t stopped Sarah Boxer, a former New York Times ...”

“... In July 1785, Thomas Jefferson, then American Ambassador to France, paid a visit to the dungeon of the Château de Vincennes. Its three-metre-thick walls had previously imprisoned Diderot and the Marquis de Sade. Now, however, it housed the workshop of a gunsmith, Honoré Blanc, and a dozen assistants. As Jefferson watched, Blanc sorted into bins the pieces of 50 musket flintlocks: ‘tumblers, lock plates, frizzens, pans, cocks, sears, bridals, screws and springs ...”

“... the mid-1990s. The Pentagon has confirmed that the document is a forgery, but as Arkin wrote to Donald Rumsfeld on 17 March, ‘someone familiar with Defense Department classified reporting has forged this document and given it to the press in the hope that it would be reported as genuine. Such an action raises deeply troubling questions about the integrity ...”

“... Killed in War’, which seems to be a self-accusing revision of the early and inadequate Dylan Thomas imitation, ‘On the Death of a Child’, but is also in part a rewriting of Yeats, contending that the unjust killing of children requires for its comprehension a dimension beyond the humanistic. In Sad Ires (1975) there is the very powerful ‘Stations ...”

“... was given a further boost by a rare, cryptic – and surprisingly ungainly – endorsement from Thomas Pynchon, who described Mills’s novel as a ‘demented, deadpan comic wonder’ with ‘the exuberant power of a magic word it might possibly be dangerous (like the title of a certain other Scottish tale) to speak out loud’. Later, a great deal of ...”

“... The technology that made the network possible had been devised by Paul Baran in the US and Donald Davies in the UK, working independently of each other – the Newton and Leibniz of the information age. ‘Packet switching’ allows data to be broken up into units (‘packets’) of a manageable and standard size, which can then be sent separately ...”