“... 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 ...”

“... perhaps, to the cruel though well-meaning Poor Law of 1834. In top-and-tail essays Asa Briggs and David Donnison make what they can of a disparate assembly which ranges from Josephine Butler and Charles Booth to R.I. Morant and William Beveridge. As Donnison points out, equality was seldom their explicit goal. Nor was the growth of a centralised bureaucratic ...”

“... as irresponsibly denying the importance for everybody of being able to write formal English. David Sutcliffe’s British Black English, which was written for teachers who want to know more about those dialects, was criticised recently on those grounds in the Times Educational Supplement. As if it were a waste of time to understand the language which ...”

“... The Language of Music – undertaken by three personal friends, Hazel Smalley and the composers David and Colin Matthews. In North America, that first and most important book of his has proved him what I have described as ‘one of our time’s two or three major analytic intellects’; I am indulging in this self-quotation because the present dust-jacket ...”

“... dozens of times): all these begin to pall. Second, we have the testimony of somebody called Joe David Bellamy. Mr Bellamy appears, presumably with Wolfe’s warm approval, as the writer of an introduction to this anthology. Here he is in full spate: Temperamentally, Tom Wolfe is, from first to last, with every word and deed, a comic writer with an ...”

“... to the category of purely inventive or observant novelists, like Balzac or Dickens (setting aside David Copperfield). Plot invention, in particular, was never his forte: Le Rouge et le Noir derived from two separate causes célèbres, La Chartreuse from an untrustworthy 16th-century account of the youthful escapades of Pope Paul III, and Lucien Leuwen was ...”

“... accession. Bernard Bergonzi’s The Roman Persuasion is attended by so many coincidental links to David Lodge’s recent How far can you go? that to remark on them is almost unavoidable. By ‘links’ I don’t mean influence, for they are books of very different kinds, and I should surmise from internal evidence that Bergonzi’s was written earlier. They ...”

“... A.J.P. Tailspin. The reason Charles gets introduced to them (along with Rayon Woollens and F.R. Looseleaf) is that James thinks he has a joke or two on each of them. For a book and a half, therefore, we more or less lose sight of the Prince and are beckoned back into the world of academic and literary dispute: again, a world James knows something ...”

“... appointments encircled in red. For some reason, too, Miss Bunbury refers to Dan Jacobson as ‘David’ – an odd, striking detail, which, in addition to being true, contributes to the theme of alternative existences. By contrast, Jacobson’s wife is not named in the memoir: she is ‘the young woman’, another gesture, it seems to me, towards what ...”

“... in which Uriah Heep – ‘looking flabby and lead-coloured in the moonlight’ – explains to David Copperfield the experiences that showed him the value of being ’umble. ‘Dickens was a great connoisseur of hypocrisy,’ she writes, ‘yet he was not obsessive about it ... Why has his sense of humanity been so rare? Why are people so overwhelmed by ...”

“... this period; and so did men of the calibre of Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox, Henry Grattan, David Ricardo, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and William Wilberforce. ‘What a mercy to have been born an Englishman, in the 18th century,’ mused the latter, and if one had the right class and gender and a taste for rhetoric, flair and professionalism in ...”

“... Books of Number is a maddening expenditure of manifest talent on a silly fiction. Two characters, David Jackson and the poet, conduct interminable séances at which spirits of the dead gradualluy unfold the Truth about the universe. It is at once a whimsical and grandiose scheme, combining myth, religion and science (God is Biology). There is some camp fun ...”

“... amends for being beastly to the Astors by emphasising how in England the sixth generation – David, John Jacob VII, and Gavin, especially – has made amends for the social callousness of earlier ones, shouldering offices and duties galore (including a Lord-Lieutenancy), all of a kind Bence-Jones and Montgomery-Massingberd would approve. At the same ...”