“... 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 ...”

“... English Faculty. Obsessively, the contributors to this collection return to the figure of F.R. Leavis, and although they would like to make that sour puritan redundant they concede that radical theory cannot bypass something called ‘Left-Leavisism’ – i.e. an embattled and doubly puritanical hostility to ‘the critical establishment’. Here, we ...”

“... acknowledges, on research done for other projected and equally unauthorised lives of Hammett by David Fechheimer and William Godschalk, and upon material gathered by William Nolan, editor of Dashiell Hammett: A Casebook. In other words, Shadow Man emerges from a background of intrigue: prolonged scuffling in the literary undergrowth and a growing sense of ...”

“... the internal politics of the IRA and describes the tensions between Dublin intellectuals like David O’Connell and the Belfast leaders. As in his account of Loyalist terrorism, he both analyses the movement’s theoretical ideas and describes some of their murderous acts. His work is not polemical and it is remarkable as much for its open-mindedness as ...”

“... into that of causality is not, as Russell once said it was, a purely arbitrary stipulation. David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, which is usually judged to be his principal contribution to philosophy, though he himself preferred his later and more polished Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, was first ...”

“... produced less certainty about who really did what to whom than if Jeremy Thorpe, George Deakin, David Holmes and John Le Mesurier had been invited to take off their shoes and socks and walk along a trench full of glowing charcoal. As with the trench method, the populace gathered to watch or to read about how the defendants survived this ...”

“... of its nature. He also maintains that if a and b are identical, there must be some sortal concept f which assigns both a and b to some natural or artificial kind and accounts for the manner of their coincidence. Thus, on this view, a cannot simply be the same as b: it has to be the same something as b and the character of this something, whether it be a ...”

“... stagecraft and of her dialogue diction from Shakespeare, a dramatic ancestry that was audible in David Buxton’s 1978 production of The Rover at Colchester. Ms Goreau’s feminist dogma rests, however, on the manifestly false assumption, which is at the same time bitterly insulting to women, that no woman possesses imagination enough to identify herself ...”

“... but these attacks ought not to be forgotten. They are what this country is capable of. The poet David Holbrook said that the Beatles were talentless, and that their music, and the dancing that went with it, were ‘a low form of masturbation’. This was in a letter of 1964 to the New Statesman, the people’s friend, where Paul Johnson had proclaimed that ...”

“... Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, was published in 1872, when he was 27, and while he was a Professor of Classics at Basel. It had the unusual effect, for him, of attracting some attention at the time of its appearance: after that, Nietzsche’s writings virtually ceased to be noticed until the 1890s, by which time he was, for the last 11 years of his life, insane, virtually without speech, and out of touch with the world ...”