“... about, and it does, the painters may do it best. Yet they may need critics to make them talk, as David Sylvester, the great master of the interviewing discipline, has induced Hodgkin to talk in the past. When all is said the paintings do the real talking in their own tongue, but we still need to have our attention directed to them, our possible blindnesses ...”

“... It is easy to conjure up landscapes of the past peopled by holy fools, and to suppose that medieval times were full of simpleton jesters, and boy bishops leading rites of inversion and showing how all sinners were equal in God’s eyes. It is equally easy to imagine a subsequent darkening of the plain – the old Christian reverence for simplicity yielding to the carceral project of modernity, Foucault’s great confinement ...”

“... the training colleges, may serve for an example; and finally direct intervention, as symbolised by David Blunkett’s threat (Independent on Sunday, 23 February) to ‘lay down from the centre exactly how reading should be taught’. Hobbes would have known what to call this: it is ‘a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, which ceaseth only in ...”

“... for a coaching job were Vince Lombardi, most famous of American football coaches, Nelson and David Rockefeller (Bollettieri had been ‘the family pro’) and Maxwell Taylor, Chief of Staff of the US Army. What doesn’t much matter to Bollettieri is education, but then education doesn’t much matter to tennis. Becker and Courier have been spotted ...”

“... part of the century. Filipczak draws attention to the career of another upwardly-mobile painter, David Teniers II, who fashioned a variant of the gallery picture at mid-century: shells, scientific instruments and so on are jettisoned in favour of works of art placed in an environment reminiscent of a modern picture collection, a constcamer. This change of ...”

“... a series of indictments and tax investigations. Kennedy’s replacement on the McCarthy staff was David Schine, too rich and too good-looking for his own good, an empty-headed chaser of pinks and reds. In 1952 Cohn and Schine went on a junket to Europe, to find and root out the Communist books on the shelves of the US Information Service, a State Department ...”

“... even if (as I suggested a few weeks ago) there was not then the degree of national consensus which David Marquand, in The Unprincipled Society, would have us believe, there was at any rate full employment, or as near to it as a liberal-democratic capitalist society is ever going to get. But just as, in the Thirties, the failure of the previous Labour ...”

“... of Samuel: estrangement from the prophet leaves Saul with black moods that are only relieved by David’s lyre. But music for Jones’s characters is rarely restorative. Their Vietnam War is not fought against a mythic soundtrack of rock and roll. Only in desperation can the soldier coming to the end of 30 days’ mess duty hope ‘that Joan Baez would sing ...”

“... John Horne Tooke enjoyed two distinct political careers, under two different names: as John Horne in the age of the American Revolution, and as John Horne Tooke in that of the French Revolution. In both identities he attracted notoriety or fame, according to the prejudices of commentators. Extolled as a champion of liberty and mocked as a mischief-maker in countless cartoons and ballads, pamphlets and newspapers, Horne Tooke was a man who was well known in his own lifetime, but who made no permanent contribution to the cause of British liberty ...”

“... a social drama of heartache and struggle equal to the torments and terrors of Arthur Miller or David Mamet’s salesmen. As Zdatny explains and Long complains, hairdressers were at the bottom of a hierarchy of fashion, helpless in the face of the couturiers of the great fashion houses who kept their models’ hair short and simple so as not to distract ...”

“... old as Marcuse’s 1937 essay on ‘The Affirmative Character of Culture’ and as contemporary as David Lloyd and Paul Thomas’s 1998 Culture and the State – that such a culture, when it is officially sponsored by even the most benevolent and enlightened state, may easily serve to maintain a very non-utopian status quo. If there is an embarrassing absence ...”

“... reader a recognisable stock character. This is Ronald Reagan, here renamed President O’Reilly. (David Lodge’s version, ‘Ronald Ruck’, was funnier.) D.M. Thomas offers a farcical interview with President O’Reilly in which the old man is so confused that he can only answer the question before the last:     ‘What is your outlook on ...”

“... about the lepidoptera. The second is an anecdote about Professor Stanley Gardiner and Inspector David of the Cambridge Police. The third records a moment in 1944 when Rothschild just happened to be the senior British officer in Paris and had a delicate passage with the Préfet and our ambassador Duff Cooper about the latter’s relations with Madame Louise ...”

“... study of John Everard; and there is some predictably tough and valuable political analysis from David Underdown and Nicholas Rogers. What emerges from most of these essays, however, is not so much the undoubted ideological confluence of English and American radicals, as the disparities between their respective national experiences in the past and their ...”

“... in Professor Saddlemyer’s contribution to Irish Renaissance, edited by Robin Skelton and David Clark (Dolmen Press, 1965), but I suppose that volume is long out of print. So it is good to have all this material brought together, splendidly elucidated by Professor Saddlemyer’s notes. The new volume also incorporates the relevant matter from ...”