“... loyalty, it emerges, is something of an Israeli speciality. As one anti-Communist supporter of David Ben-Gurion put it, in a reference to leftist immigrants from the Soviet Union: ‘In our relations with the USA we have in that country a fifth column, whereas in our dealings with the Soviet Union they have a fifth column here.’ The problem of dual ...”

“... if controversial’, although, as I see it, justice could be done to them only by a writer like David Lodge or Malcolm Bradbury. It seems evident to me that their work is for the most part based on a very small element of truth whose significance is inflated out of all proportion, that facts buttressing the case are carefully selected, and all the evidence ...”

“... After a visit to England in 1958, during which she has visited Evelyn Waugh. L.P. Hartley, David Cecil and others, she writes: ‘I find all these writers take themselves very seriously & Tony Powell speaks of Punch, of which he is literary editor, as though it were an important vehicle of intellectual opinion.’ This is probably very well said. But ...”

“... keep at it. Some, notably Rosalind Belben, have even joined them. But most, like Robert Nye and David Plante, have expanded their canvases. The Johnsonian experimental novel has been more or less buried, just as the Little England novel has been more or less buried, beneath the linguistic intrusion of the Empire striking back. As a literary agent, I seem to ...”

“... his political career. The story is well told, with good use of an extract from an interview with David Butler in which Benn describes the legal and political battle that led to the rejection of his case by the Election Court. The struggle evidently played a large part in radicalising Benn, lending an edge to his political sense, and particularly his sense of ...”

“... owners encouraging their voracity by throwing them live hares on the end of a rope; and a trainer, David Haywood, has reported animals being fed amphetamines, cocaine, dexedrine and angel-dust before races. Word is out of recent approaches made to trainers by bookmarkers, offering money to ‘slow’ a dog – doping is still a considerable problem – and the ...”

“... to choose a page of Hebrew prose from one of the new Israeli novelists such as Meir Shalev and David Grossman, however, one would be more likely to encounter dense constellations of idioms, peculiar lexical usages and allusive resonances that are distinctively Hebrew, many going back to the Bible and the language of the early rabbis. Such a restless ...”

“... For Tolstoy and Hemingway, as for Homer, writing about war was the natural thing. They did not exactly worship the demands of ‘hateful Ares’, as Homer calls him; but they knew that war as hell was the proper field of the heroic, and thus of narrative itself. The story of what happens in a football match today is our equivalent of yesterday’s battle; and it can be established later, as game, in the same heroic sequence ...”

“... cross old Peggotty’s arm – and she died like a child that had gone to sleep!’ Clara’s son David, his retrospective narrative voice moving between the worlds of service and gentility, speaks for Dickens in musing on the socially ambitious Em’ly: ‘I have asked myself the question, would it have been better for little Em’ly to have had the waters ...”

“... 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 ...”