“... The enlightened editor of this publication has sent me these three books for review, having detected some symmetry which might make a joint review appropriate. All three are concerned with an aspect of freedom of speech; all three, moreover, attend to the age-old enigma of whether betrayal of a pledge can ever be justified, and if so, in what circumstances ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... on by the medical profession, set out to curb the tobacco industry. They were Kenneth Robinson and David Owen (Labour) and Sir George Young (Tory). All three were routed. The hardest fighter of the three was Sir George Young. His determination to cut down, for instance, on tobacco’s sponsorship of sports made him unpopular in those parts of the Tory Party ...”

“... Labour. That accord, and the fact that it held, owes a lot to the personality and strengths of David Lange: but if the Left had split, as it has split here between socialists and SDP, we would have had yet another term of the execrable Muldoon and the yes-men he gathered around him. In our SW9 house there is evidence that our landlord and his wife have ...”

“... place are four Meko 140 frigates and four Meko 360 destroyers powered by Rolls-Royce engines, David Brown gearboxes and Decca navigation equipment: all made by us, though ordered before April 1982 after Cecil Parkinson, in his incarnation as Minister of State at the Board of Trade, had gone to Buenos Aires and eulogised the Junta for coping with their ...”

“... When future historians come to write about the 1983 General Election, these two books will be essential reading. One is a thorough compilation of the evidence, and the other a brilliant line drawing of a maverick who streaked dramatically across the scene causing all heads to turn and significantly affecting the outcome. I recommend to the researcher of the year 2000 that he or she start with Militant, to get properly into the mood ...”

“... It was R. B. McCallum who invented the word ‘psephology’ to describe the study of elections. Yet in 1955 he wrote of the act of voting as the last haven of free choice in an increasingly bureaucratised society, an ultimate redoubt to be defended at all costs against the assault of the social sciences. ‘The secrecy of the ballot, the pencilled cross in the secluded polling booth’, was, he said, ‘the great eleusinian mystery of the democratic state ...”

“... This is a collection of essays by one of our best literary critics, in fact exactly the kind of thing one would expect from him; it simply continues the good work in the manner of his last two books. Why, then, do the reviewers shy like frightened cab-horses? Because Professor Lodge not only includes about seventy-five pages of ‘structuralism’, but actually uses the word in his title, and suggests that it is possible for an English professor to get along with it ...”

“... This volume marks an extension of Mr Irving’s historiography: indeed, its critical reception has already provoked him to reply (in the New Statesman, 8 May) that he sees himself as ‘dedicated to the Augean task of revising modern history’. There are, of course, similarities with his earlier work: the vast mass of detail, painstakingly gathered from an impressive range of oral and written sources (although the rewards are rarely commensurate with the amount of energy used up); the same idiosyncratic use of evidence, as he proceeds from quite minor discoveries to challenging generalisations; and the same bewildering mixture of detailed narrative garnished with reported speech and snippets of broad analysis ...”

“... home and sit under the staircase. And his conclusion is consistent with that scathingly drawn by David Owen: ‘the Royal Family, central government and local government politicians, the admirals, generals and air marshals and senior administrators all survive. But millions of others lose their lives. Money is to be spent on Sub-Regional Headquarters; the ...”

“... ancient ‘quantity theory of money’ which, two centuries after it was so elegantly spelt out by David Hume and a century after it was translated into snappy but empty symbols – MV = PT – by Irving Fisher, is still the basis of so much analysis of inflation. As Sir Ian says, ‘old doctrines never die: in economics, they never even fade away.’ He ...”

“... of several witnesses, including Mr Arnot (represented at the local ratepayers’ expense by Sir David Napley) and three pathologists, returned an open verdict on the death of Helen Smith. The Foreign Office case, of course, though officials latterly pretended to be disinterested, required a verdict of ‘accidental death’. Allah is All-knowing: were ...”

“... particularly disappointing not to find any mention of Gary Nash’s The Urban Crucible (1979) or David Galenson’s White Servitude in Colonial America (1981). Student readers of Jones and Brogan could be forgiven for thinking that little of relevance has been published in this area of American history since the mid-1970s, while nothing could be further from ...”

“... businessmen visited the country to drum up trade, they found that the Labour Foreign Secretary Dr David Owen’s distaste for Argentina’s record on human rights was an obstacle to their embassy: there was pressure on Owen to change his critical attitude. A consortium of British banks led by Lloyds organised a 75 million dollar loan soon after the Videla ...”

“... 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 ...”