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“... cultural imperialism go blithely hand in hand. This is a fruitful context in which to consider George Davie’s new book. Its pages contain in embryonic form a theory of Scottish culture which, when developed, has the power radically to reshape English Studies and to make sense of post-Enlightenment Scottish literature by tying it into the wider ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... on constitutional as against economic and social issues. I wish he would speak out more. Meanwhile George Galloway, Dennis Canavan and other MPs active in Scotland United are seeking 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Recollections of George Oppen in a Letter to a Friend ‘This lime-tree bower my prison’                                         Coleridge That lime-tree – no, what is it? mulberry? – bower at combe’s bottom, your Brook Cottage where the light sleeps so evenly in silence one would not say even in summer’s heat it pulses ...”

“... Donald Davie is already known for – among many other things – his striking comments on the hymns of Watts and Wesley in A Gathered Church: The Literature of the English Dissenting Interest 1700-1930 (1978). Now he has devoted an entire book to the hymn in 18th-century England – or rather, as the title indicates, he is trying to define a specific genre or set of modes and tones that constitute ‘the 18th-century hymn ...”

“... called “Rock-Drill”, and the inauguration of the next, called “Thrones”.’ This is Donald Davie in his introduction to Studies in Ezra Pound, offered as Volume IV of his Collected Works, and including the whole of Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (1964), followed by a single essay from 1972, then ‘Six Notes on Ezra Pound’ from Trying to Explain (1980 ...”

“... and a wry postcard, long ago, from Stanford, as well as more substantial talks. He was Donald Davie, who was born in Barnsley in 1922 and died in Devon last autumn, a precise and passionate poet and critic, the Empson or the Eliot of his generation. Or rather, he would have been the Empson or Eliot of his generation, if his generation had not largely ...”

“... and afford established authority and tradition an exaggerated respect.’ Well, followers of George Davie and his vision of the ‘democratic intellect’ in Scottish education might dispute Smout’s emphases while necessarily admitting many of his facts. Readers of certain recent Scottish fiction and poetry, on the other hand, will find the image ...”

“... By one of those coincidences which one is minded mindlessly to call ironical, both arms of Donald Davie’s Czeslaw Milosz and the Insufficiency of Lyric are also embraced in Enright’s book. Enright has a section on ‘Milosz and the Case Against’, a respectful wary circling which becomes incautious only at the moment when, with rhetorical ...”

“... that he owned newspapers to make political propaganda. The life which Anne Chisholm and Michael Davie have written begins with a piece of elegant writing, like a dream sequence. It is an unpublished piece written by Davie as a very young Observer reporter. It incorporates Raymond, Beaverbrook’s camp valet who would ...”

“... Fainlight’s poems and everything that is implied in the essays about modern poetry in Donald Davie and the Responsibilities of Literature. Here we are in a man’s world, more specifically the world of male academics in committee, responsible for defining the proper areas of poetic idiom, arbitrating between them, assessing performance and promise. For ...”

“... volume contained work by eight poets: Robert Conquest, D.J. Enright, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, John Holloway, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin and John Wain, to which list Conquest’s volume added the name of Thom Gunn. Insofar as there has ever been agreement on the matter, the Movement has been taken to consist of these nine writers. They ...”

“... by Other Means are warm in their praise of Enright’s sanity, humanity and intelligence. Donald Davie agrees that Enright is ‘deeply humane, indeed humanitarian’, but then argues that this humanitarianism continually inhibits his poetry. Davie suggests that the pressure of the responsibilities entailed on Enright by ...”

“... crossed Newfoundland, 33 hours before he landed in Paris. The French President decorated him; King George V received him at Buckingham Palace; President Coolidge sent a cruiser and an admiral to bring him home. In Chesapeake Bay, Mr Kennedy tells us, the cruiser was met by four destroyers, two army dirigibles and a fly-past from all three services. Ashore in ...”