“... who write poetry of home are often aware of its dangers though they may not always avoid them. David Dabydeen’s ‘Coolie Odyssey’, dedicated ‘for Ma’, and included in Section One of the four-part ‘alternative’ anthology, The New British Poetry, opens: Now that peasantry is in vogue, Poetry bubbles from peat bogs, People strain for the old ...”

“... and outer chaos is such that one occasionally imagines it could be easily made into a movie (by David Mamet, perhaps, another connoisseur of the disturbing set-up), but then come such wonderful moments as the following, when Nashe and the gambler Pozzi arrive for the big game:Nashe put the car into neutral, applied the emergency brake, and climbed out to ...”

“... with mink collars and cuffs; her 18-carat-gold belt was decorated with 50 carved emeralds from David Webb, one of the finest jewellers in America; her three-acre garden brimmed with the rarest orchids in Southern California, and her kitchen produced cuisine worthy of connoisseurs. In addition to a Los Angeles mansion in affluent Holmby Hills, the ...”

“... clearly carry weight, but not necessarily an overriding weight in every case. In the 18th century David Hume affirmed, entirely truthfully, that he fully believed, like everyone else, that the sun would rise on the following day, but meanwhile the famous critique of induction – the demonstration that we can have no reason for supposing that the future will ...”

“... capitalist system had only temporarily stabilised itself, and that the stabilisation was not by means of Keynesian welfarism but by reliance on a permanent war economy which proved the continuing irrationality of this mode of production. That the Soviet Union and its satellites were not the affirmation but the negation of socialism, resting on a system of ...”

“... led to massive concentrations of industry and, in the 19th century, to the railways as a means of distribution. Both sources of power therefore give geographic and quantitative indicators for the economy. Some of the maps in Water Power in Scotland stress the sharp upturn in the economy after 1770, and the whole story of the use of this power shows ...”

“... of the editor, even ‘boredom and emptiness were to be experienced to the full.’ By comparison, David Josephson’s more modest essay on Percy Grainger in Music and Civilisation comes as a refreshing surprise. Josephson is a victim of Lang’s musicological high-mindedness only to the extent that he distrusts any kind of ad hominem argument that could ...”

“... keep telling you that a particular phrase is indeed proverbial and that you can find out what it means by consulting the Oxford Dictionary of English ...”

“... Blundell heretically declared it unnatural and took a short way to putting matters right. ‘By means of a little castration and cutting away the brats it became a sleeping Venus and as pleasing a figure as any in this collection.’ Knight went about wholeheartedly preaching the cause of free love and paganism, to which he adhered as a matter of practice ...”

“... East-West axis is, I believe, that it is the axis of power, of history; to go from East to West means to go from war to peace, from Communism to Capitalism, from old to new, from sentiment to hygiene; it is the route of the Jews, of political and other refugees. One has only to think of the many passages in Roth that describe the sad songs of fugitives and ...”

“... is Frank McGregor, whose unpublished thesis on the Rangers (Oxford, 1968) has been pillaged by David wholesale, yet who gave to him the most interesting part of his case. For McGregor, in several articles, has himself developed the argument that George Fox and others used the odium of Ranterism as a useful disciplinary control, and, in the case of early ...”

“... of), with European diseases, with money, with intermarriage – even with kindness. Whatever the means and the intention, and however the indigenous people may have collaborated in their own downfall, history has rolled cruelly over the Maori race. Today they are disproportionately the urban proletariat, the unemployed, the disaffected. From their 10 per ...”

“... The broadcast was an exercise in propaganda. At the end, however, ‘the hapless, but by no means witless, prisoner’, as Said calls him, outflanks his interrogator, who is blinkered by counter-insurgency jargon. Israeli broadcaster: Lastly, Mr Terrorist: would you like to send a message to your family? Palestinian fedayi: I’d like to assure my ...”

“... Crisis of Drug Addiction’, though some of his historical observations show that this is by no means the first such crisis in Britain. The drink problem in 18th-century London, so powerfully recorded by Hogarth and Fielding, was certainly a crisis. The liquor known as Geneva – familiarised by British tipplers as ‘gin’ – was introduced by the Court ...”

“... to save them from starving.’ But the story did not end there. When in 2002 the home secretary, David Blunkett, slipped into a bill a provision expressly empowering such action, the Human Rights Act required him to include a safety-net provision that the use of the power was not to result in inhuman or degrading treatment of the destitute. Mr Justice ...”