“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... during the period under review. Is this an example of the new ‘tory’ history, identified by David Cannadine and others, in which the systematic dismantling of the epic events of yesteryear both symbolises and contributes to British national decline? Perhaps, but I do not think so. Though Dr Webster’s account is more complex and less heroic than ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... all separate in our bodies, all nobody to each other and everything to ourselves.’ Readers of David Plante’s novels may recognise this brand of solipsism, half stricken, half thrilled. It would be untrue to say that the conviction of solitariness goes untested in the course of the book, but by the end it has been vindicated at least as much as argued ...”

“... scar. How can the celebrity outsider maintain a sense of his identity, or painterly authority, when he is his own subject-matter and his audience sees that subject-matter as ‘other’, less than ‘us’? Basquiat’s solutions to this dilemma are often brilliant. In the triptych Zydeco (1984), for example, a cinematographer in profile looks through the lens of his movie camera ...”

“... Gallant has been offered a regular platform under the benign aegis of William Maxwell and, later, David Menaker. Although they span almost half a century – the earliest was published in 1953, the latest in 1995, Gallant’s 73rd year – they are nonetheless eerily consistent in voice and preoccupation. Gallant writes about exiled people: characters in ...”

“... of late but it never sells. On 6 November 1992 it was estimated at 75,000 Swiss francs for the David Feldman Rarities of the World auction in Zurich. On 11 December 1993 it was back in New Zealand again, as Lot 237 at John Mowbray’s Stanley Gibbons auction and again it didn’t sell. It is not unusual for a stamp to come onto the market at a price higher ...”

“... Fish. Fish’s salaries and lecture fees have been part of the lore of academic culture since David Lodge’s Changing Places (1975), where he appeared thinly disguised as Morris Zapp, who, ‘enviably offered his first job by Euphoria State, had stuck out for twice the going salary, and got it’; and who had ‘the professional killer instinct’ in a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a roster of the British writers who have received the most international recognition: Bunting, David Jones, Hugh MacDiarmid and W.S. Graham are just a few of them. The work of these poets, and their successors in Other, is not inaccessible; it is ‘differently immediate’. Both the Prynne Poems and the anthology are easy enough to find in the shops, so ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... subscribing to le dernier cri from Europe’. Rothko dominates an essay in the Hopper catalogue by David Anfam, the author of the Rothko catalogue raisonné, who notes that ‘so much has been written about Edward Hopper that perhaps one of the few remaining royal roads by which to approach him is via another massively interpreted artist.’ Anfam makes the ...”

“... into an altruistic triangle ending in marriage; Agnes’s benign relation to Dora is the crux of David Copperfield; Lucy Snowe in Villette is seen isolating herself through her resistance to desire for or friendship with women; Pip in Great Expectations is the feminised child or doll in the cruel triad of Estella/Pip/Miss Havisham; and Trollope (punitively ...”