“... for New Times’ – a general political statement or programme – and a fable for the 1990s by David Edgar. The book is long, and since several contributors are responsible for more than one essay, there is a good deal of repetition. Tighter editorial control would have done no harm, though that might have been construed as inhibiting the openness of the ...”

“... Enright accepts that great art is ‘amoral, unleashing energies which do not stop short of, which may even seek out, gratuitous ferocities’. Davie’s criticisms are of course reflected everywhere in Enright’s poetry itself, most obviously in its anxieties about the impotence of the liberal humanist. In ‘A Liberal Lost’, from The Old Adam ...”

“... another socialist doctor, Leslie Haden Guest, who later became a Labour MP. Her second husband, David Eder, also a doctor, ‘was one of the first English medical men to fall under the influence of Freud’ and to disseminate his ideas. A Zionist of the mild kind, he envisaged a Jewish State as part of the British Empire. The Eders’ house was ‘a meeting ...”

“... provide. The signs now are of a swing back to a different, more literal translation of the Bible. David Rosenberg’s The Book of J (1990) reads very differently from things like the Good News Bible or the Revised English Bible: The man named his wife Hava: she would have all who live, smooth the way, mother.     Now Yahweh made clothes from skins of ...”

“... people’ to pass. Even if you find the apartment, you might not find Blam: he may have slipped out along the narrow walkway that crosses the roof, above ‘the abyss’ of Main Square. On the other hand, ‘if there were a search warrant out for him’ the mansard’s seclusion would ‘turn it into a trap’. If cornered he’d ...”

“... purged. Even in the Hollywood years, some indelible poshocracy remained. On making friends with David Hockney, in LA in the 1960s, Isherwood enthusiastically exclaimed: ‘Oh David, we’ve so much in common; we love California, we love American boys, and we’re from the North of England!’ Parker adds: ‘As Hockney ...”

“... David Abulafia ends his engaging survey of the first encounters between Europeans and the indigenous peoples of the New World with the words of the prophet Malachi: ‘Have we not all one father? Has not one God created us?’ This question, with its corollary, ‘Why do we deal treacherously, every man against his brother, profaning the covenant of our forefathers?’ looms large in his book, just as it did in the minds of more thoughtful 16th-century Europeans as they became aware that the world was more diverse and more crowded than their forefathers could ever have imagined ...”

“... the whole world more barbarous than that custom of these coasters in the west of England.’David Cressy, a historian of early modern Britain, wants to rescue these customs from such condescension. Coastal folk were not the immoral ‘wreckers’ of 18th-century myths, luring ships onto rocks with false lights; nor were they the proletarian heroes of ...”

“... to find some students who have gone pot-holing and not come up. A young caver from our village, David Anderson, is one of the rescue team. The water is rising and as he is going down he slips into a narrow gulley. Though he is roped up, the force of the torrent is too much for his companions: as they struggle to pull him out, his light still shining through ...”

“... sympathetic to the manager, as many were not – many were his unscrupulous enemies. For David Lacey of the Guardian Gascoigne had a tendency to give away the ball and to be a clown. It was not surprising that his place in the national team remained less than assured. On the eve of the tournament Kenny Dalglish, the Liverpool manager, declared on ...”

“... exact nature of the potential ‘native’ vegetable-and meat-supply is not spelled out; and that may be as well for Malouf’s purpose, since it is indicated that Sir George’s estate grows strawberries, grapes, peaches and asparagus; grazes deer, Breton cows, and an Arabian bull; and runs peacocks and pheasants. There is a slight oddness about the shaping ...”

“... with an Order of 1940 was last used in February of 1951, by the Attlee Government. All this may be familiar and even obvious. But it is not seen as quite so obvious by David Marquand, whose newly-published The Unprincipled Society* tells the history of 20th-century Britain in terms of the rise and fall of a ...”

“... bore – he is so insistent as to be a positive fatigue.’ This tart commentary was provided by David Alexander Edward Lindsay, better-known (after he succeeded his father in 1913) as the 27th Earl of Crawford, and probably best-known as the tenth Earl of Balcarres, a junior title that did not bar him from the House of Commons. To unravel his pedigree, as ...”

“... often as a way of putting Americans in their place) that we lack a proper historical sense. It may be true. The New Zealand poet Charles Brasch wrote poems looking forward to a time when we, too, would have a landscape littered with ruins. ‘The plains are nameless and the cities cry for meaning,’ he wailed. I think he ...”

“... that so much of their own research has been conducted in more modern periods of American history may help to explain the gross injustice they have perpetrated on the first century and a half of European settlement. Of Professor Jones’s 696 pages of text only 36 are devoted to the years between 1607 and 1763. Professor Tindall, with 164 pages (including ...”