“... relations with ITN,’ concludes Ingham, ‘were much easier. I got on extremely well with Sir David Nicholas and Sir Alastair Burnet and Sue Tinson.’ No wonder. Burnet was a legendary Thatcher-worshipper and Sue Tinson was once a candidate for the job of Head of Information at Tory Central Office. On page 366, Sir Bernard declares his hatred for ‘the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... any Scots from the indictment (though – unkindest cut – he does exonerate one Welshman, David Jones). Worse still for Crawford, Kenner announces, ‘There’s no longer an English literature’: by which he means that, whereas ‘talent has not been lacking’ – on the contrary, ‘good poets are dispersed round the land’ and each has a personal ...”

“... prejudice against their French allies led to the folly of the Battle of Loos in September 1915. David French, on the other hand, explains how the responsibility for another great disaster, the third Battle of Ypres, was subsequently blamed on the French by Haig and Lloyd George, who ‘agreed to launch the Flanders offensive in the full knowledge that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... using all manner of natural light sources, from oscilloscopes to bonfires, filming at 8 f.p.s. (on the oscilloscope) to get an exposure and asking the actors to move at half-speed, pushing emulsion further and further in the labs, using mirrors in interiors to reflect sunlight as a sole source ... There may be a small queue of cinematographers ...”

“... but have won the respect of professional critics, who are favoured: V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, David Storey, Paul Scott, Iris Murdoch, for instance. Beyond that it isn’t easy to see much significance in the list – perhaps there’s a nostalgia for the old Empire (Scott, J.G. Farrell, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, plus Nadine Gordimer, Naipaul, and P.H. Newby ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... artists paid attention. After Vien, the representative artists of the new movement were Mengs and David; it was not from literature but from art that André Chénier learned the importance of the buried cities. His work was affected by this knowledge; so was the Anacharsis of the Abbé Barthélemy, published in 1788. Even women’s fashions showed the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”