“... is the heroine. Miss Oates can make one care about Marya’s situation, but not about Marya. David Leavitt’s The Lost Language of Cranes is a coming-out novel. Its story is basically simple, but artistically risky. Twenty-five-year-old Philip Benjamin brings himself to tell his parents, Owen and Rose, that he is a homosexual. Owen, the father, then ...”

“... of it to heel, especially in the province of Mosul, where the Kurdish separatists took up arms. David Omissi has told the story in Air Power and Colonial Control of how the battle for the separate identity of the RAF was won on the bombing fields of Iraq, with Lord Trenchard, the top airman, joining forces with Winston Churchill to argue that there was no ...”

“... For anyone who prefers to concentrate solely on the negative side of the Pound ledger David Gordon’s selection inevitably offers material. Pound’s tone with those who were trying to help him was often rude and ungrateful, even when his situation was desperate. you punks NEVER connect ANYthing withanything else ...    do stir the mud in yr ...”

“... as pain, as malformation, as stunted growth. In this novel, as in his earlier See Under: Love, David Grossman reveals himself as a compassionate epidemiologist for those who experience history as inexorably degenerative disease, for lives which might be said to suffer from history as claustrophobia. For Grossman in both novels, as for Grass in The Tin ...”

“... Poetry anthologies are now expected to make holy war; but what to do with The New Poetry, which strives so earnestly to turn its trumpet-majors into angels? The 55 poets collected here are, it seems, seraphs of a benevolent novelty, somehow singing their good news at once uniquely and in shimmering unison. ‘A multicultural society,’ write the editors in their introduction, ‘challenges the very idea of a centre, and produces pluralism of poetic voice ...”

“... the Macmillan Modern Novelists Series sternly fixed on ‘close examination of important texts’, David Dowling’s study sets out ‘to foreground the aspect of Faulkner’s language play’, which, he roundly asserts, ‘takes us more surely than the American South, symbolism, Gothicism or psychology to the heart of Faulkner’s genius’. He demonstrates ...”

“... Excalibur perhaps, links up the parts of the novel and is symbolic in its action. A Welshman, David Jones, runs away to sea, survives the sinking of the Titanic, becomes a cook in New York, marries Ludmilla, the daughter of his Russian employer, returns to Wales and the First World War. He is in Ireland during the Rebellion and, because he is posted as ...”

“... terrorism’ against his editors, reducing supposedly hard men like Kelvin MacKenzie and David Montgomery to stammering wrecks and causing Patsy Chapman, the editor of the News of the World, to suffer a nervous breakdown. ‘These were the calls I came to dread,’ Neil writes. ‘Not because I feared the consequences but because they were unpleasant ...”

“... benevolence like unpleasant medicine’ came under heavy fire in 19th-century literature. David Herbert’s unpretentious little book, which is written almost entirely from primary sources and is local history at its best, deals with Byron’s widow in her Lady Bountiful role. Lady Byron certainly did quite a lot for the village of Earl Shilton ...”

“... in book form in 1972, and Peter Carey’s ‘American Dreams’, a post-Vietnam satire, in 1974. David Foster’s first novel, The Pure Land, came out in 1975, and, deceptively to one side in the same year, stood Johnno, David Malouf’s first prose work. ‘It spread, throughout the Seventies and Eighties, this new ...”

“... heritage of these arguments in forgotten black authors whose works he resurrects. Beginning with David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829) and Hosea Easton’s Treatise on the Intellectual Character and the Political Condition of the Coloured People (1837), he surveys some two dozen texts, erudite and eccentric in turn, compiled by ...”

“... purpose is fulfilled it will surely give rise to yet another. In God stand up for bastards (1973) David Leitch addressed the natural mother who had given him away at birth, entreating her to come forward. And she did. They met and became friends. She died, whereupon a sister he had never known rang him up. They met and became friends. A second sister was ...”

“... eyes distinctly narrowed to blue expressionless flecks by a sudden onrush of light. Mister Punch, David Harsent’s first collection since Dreams of the Dead (1977), strikes me as a transitional book. The practice of ascribing a multitude of experiences to one figure has been vigorously maintained, especially by John Berryman in Dream Songs, though in that ...”

“... considered sinful in their time: they are Rahab the harlot, Bathsheba who was tempting to King David, Tamar who coaxed her father-in-law – and even Ruth, who crept under the bedclothes of Boaz, her kinsman. Does not this suggest that Matthew wanted to show that Mary was descended from ‘sinners’? This is far-fetched. We are not convinced that Matthew ...”

“... in responding to the challenge. Writing in the last issue of this review, the American philosopher David Hoy gives courteous attention to Hartman’s redemptive strategy. But he remains sceptical about Derrida’s influence and, in the last resort, dismissive of his claims. For him, Derrida practises a ‘recognisable genre’, that of bringing philosophy to ...”