“... It is customary to claim the idea of progress as one of the distinguishing features of Western civilisation: indeed the very success of the West is sometimes attributed to confidence in its own destiny in this respect. Its peculiar saving mission, that of liberating mankind by means of the creation of wealth, would make little sense without some underlying faith in the prospect, perhaps even the certainty, of limitless improvement ...”

“... and MI5 they will remain a threat to any Labour government and thus a threat to democracy. As David Cornwell – the spy writer John le Carré, who was in the security forces himself – said in the Independent earlier this year, if a Labour government were to win the next election, ‘the secret services would be cuddling up with the Conservative Party ...”

“... from Pat Buchanan, certainly, though less threateningly, from the Louisiana ex-Ku-Klux-Klansman, David Duke. Neither is likely to succeed, but as a moderate who has committed the deadly sin of raising taxes, Bush knows that he has to make some attempt to conciliate the more conservative wing of his party. Since the collapse of Communism has left him with few ...”

“... Alliance, when it was subsequently faced with ostensibly less intractable difficulties. Now that David Owen’s ‘continuing SDP’ has gone out of business, some gullible newspapers have written as though the party that was launched nine years ago had sunk with all hands aboard. In fact, of course, constitutionally and numerically, the real continuing SDP ...”

“... was actually seen leading an attack. If we are to believe the evidence which the British mercenary David Tomkins gave to the United States Senate, Colombia’s dirty war sprang from the Army’s frustration that the Government had allowed itself to be duped. Tomkins stated that he was recruited in 1988 by a Colombian army officer to train a paramilitary force ...”

“... This time, however, MacCarthy had picked a bad year for offhandedness: 1932 was the year in which F.R. Leavis’s Scrutiny was launched. ‘Criticism’ was no longer a word to be murmured with self-deprecation. It had become an enterprise, an undertaking, a means of finding ‘solutions’ for ‘problems’ in the present culture. In Scrutiny’s second ...”

“... response. In so doing he may have hoped to enhance his critical reputation as well: for if, as David Freedberg recently argued in The Power of Images, the aesthetic appreciation of art depends on the repression of instinctual physical reactions, the construction of an incorporeal viewer is a demand for critical (rather than popular) recognition. And this ...”

“... meet the requirements of ‘civilised engineers’ like Petroski or design specialists like David Pye. Moreover, in both countries, concern about ‘public images’ starts with the engineers themselves. As far as Britain is concerned, a contrast is sometimes drawn between Wilson’s times, the times of Samuel Smiles’s Lives of the Engineers, when ...”

“... literary critics are going to have to come to some accommodation with Burke; at the very least, as David Bromwich proposes in quite another context, they may have to embrace a Burkean language but wrest it to non-Burkean ends. This means that the relationship with ‘New Historicism’ and its marxisant traditions will inevitably be uneasy. When Harrison ...”

“... all the many commentators in the West who had something to say about the Hebron events, only one, David Shipler of the New York Times, made a connection between Baruch Goldstein, political Judaism and Zionism itself. All of them, he said correctly, are aspects of each other: they can’t be broken up into smaller, separate units called ‘single deranged ...”

“... Jean Renoir was admired by his followers and contemporaries for the relaxed feel of his films. He himself loved the improvisatory quality of the Commedia dell’Arte, which he saw as a struggle between ‘the tendency toward exterior realism and that toward interior realism’, and wrote that what he considered to be ‘the ultimate in cinema as in theatre’ was ‘a style and dialogue that sometimes borders on the burlesque ...”

“... to another style of American comedy either, the blandly sarcastic, deliberately unfunny manner of David Letterman (which has its own downsided literary counterpart in Carver’s dreary and attenuated epiphanies and Didion’s distressed reportage). In Prêt-à-Porter Altman is deliberately frivolous and shallow because he has made a farce, not because he aims ...”

“... by the Moreel triptych and some thirty more works, was classed along with Van Eyck and Gerard David as the great Flemish primitive. On that occasion his particular Flemish religiosity (again with the less-than-convincing comparison to Fra Angelico) was emphasised. On the one hand, the very model of a Flemish primitive master; on the other, the German ...”

“... the Party, the crisis within ruling circles in the Eighties, perestroika. On all these subjects, David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb is the more acute and penetrating guide. Kapuściński spends no time in dissidents’ apartments, or at the crowded press conferences in Moscow’s international press centre; high politics bores him. He has slipped away from the ...”

“... contemporaries. But they were not left to be admired – except in details like the rock the David stands on, where rusticity was appropriate. Rodin’s way of leaving figures half in and half out of the block, and letting the lines show where piece-moulds joined on bronzes, was evidence of his tenderness for the unfinished state – but these things can ...”