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“... tries to make some sense of the debris. The protagonist is a worthy, drably highflying scientist, David Krempa, for whom the main function of his wife and family is to offer unquestioning support in his work. As he prepares himself for a year’s exchange visit to London, you soon know that he is the kind of visiting scientist you must make sure to avoid at ...”

“... the result from a sample poll?’ Any return to Labour’s golden past seems as unlikely as Dr David Owen’s reappearance on its benches as a prodigal son, but Silkin’s message still has some validity for a party reeling from a third successive defeat. The truth is, he writes, credit companies tend to treat their members with more respect than Labour ...”

“... the discovery that the man pushing hardest for the opposite course was Stewart’s junior at the FO, Lord Chalfont. Chalfont was the first British minister ever to visit the Falklands. Later the friend of shahs and sultans and other unliberated tyrants, he then favoured a pragmatic sell-out of the Falklands if such could be arranged. He also wrote that ...”

“... This must be the first popular attempt in decades to prove that the sexes are inherently unequal. According to the authors of Brain Sex, the male and female brains are differently structured because of the pre-natal activity of genes and hormones, and these produce ‘the real difference’ between men and women. The traditional view of the genders is thus a valid reflection of nature, and all the liberationist adjustments in nurture since the Sixties have done nothing to change matters ...”

“... and dispassionate answer, we now have the Nuffield volume on last year’s election.† in which David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh recount the ebb and flow of battle in that relentlessly detailed and studiously prosaic style which has characterised the Nuffield studies from the beginning; and there is precious little comfort in it for Neil Kinnock, even ...”

“... stories in this book recognise it in one way or another. Most, like the examples by Helen Garner, David Brooks, Peter Carey, Joan London, Kate Grenville, are admirably achieved on this basis, the authors all born in the Forties or Fifties; and the names indicate that the newer European immigrants have not yet found a voice in their new language. Particularly ...”

“... on those grounds ‘it would be impossible in some cases to fill the bench’. When the Labour MP David Kirkwood was tried for incendiary speech-making in November that year, the chairman of the bench turned out to have been a Conservative candidate in the previous election who ‘not many months ago was saying what he would do with the “Reds” … and how ...”

“... and systematically stripped it bare. The philistine management of the character based on David Montgomery is lampooned here by Platell, who understands that newspapers shouldn’t be run by people who despise journalism. In those days we were all supposed to report to something called the Academy of Excellence, where we would be taught how to be ...”

“... of chuckling over La Vie Parisienne, doubtless introduced into Windsor Castle by her problem son David, Prince of Wales. The Queen disapproved of the Prince of Wales’s liaisons with other men’s wives. At one time she had the curious notion of installing Lord Louis Mountbatten in York House, the Prince’s residence, apparently in order to spread the ...”

“... We would like some examples of ‘the witty and highbrow artistic references’ which her friends, David and Jeremy, bandied about. But all we hear of Jeremy’s thoughts, when he and Rosie ‘tumble’ into bed, is that he thinks ‘fate had brought them together and they’d met in another lifetime.’ Jeremy is respectfully described as a ‘Cambridge ...”

“... theory developed by Archibald Alison in his Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790). David Hartley is denied his usual prominence here because his theories were materialist; Alison’s, deriving from Hume, were Platonist and therefore more hospitable to later theories of the ‘Great Memory’. It is pleasant to see one of the great works of the ...”

“... Undoubtedly, without domestication – ‘the greatest conservation movement of all time’, as David Harris has happily put it – sheep might have disappeared from the Old World. Furthermore, the link between dog and man has not been without significance for sheep. The sheep dog has its own special place in Ryder’s study. For Keneally’s ...”

“... Adolf Hitler: The Medical Diaries consists of a translation of the medical records kept by Hitler’s physician, Dr Theodor Morell, and of Mr Irving’s extensive commentaries on those records. Morell, a fashionable Berlin GP specialising in venereal diseases, became the Führer’s personal doctor at Christmas 1936. The elevation, which took place during a visit to Hitler’s retreat on the Obersalzberg, was greeted by Morell’s wife with the oracular words: ‘What do we need with that!’ – a rendering, presumably, of ‘Wozu brauchen wir das?’ The diaries begin in July 1941, a few weeks after the start of the Russian campaign ...”

“... Meehan for a murder he did not commit; Wicked beyond Belief (1980) was followed by the release of David Cooper and Michael McMahon, also detained for a murder they did not commit. Few readers of Mr Kennedy’s latest book will finish it thinking he has spoiled his immaculate record. The reader may be left with lingering doubts about whether Hauptmann had no ...”

“... on Scott, this quality is simply one aspect of Scott’s stubborn, middle-class stupidity; for David Thomson, who in Scott’s Men is as critical of Scott as Huntford but who also is more humane and less simplistic, it is a strength that is made a weakness only by artificial and cruel circumstances – a pointless race to a useless place, a race that ...”