“... with about as much in common as Michael Howard and Dennis Skinner. One of them is described by David Solkin in his Painting for Money, reviewed in these pages last year by Ronald Paulson. Solkin’s Hogarth is an ambitious social climber, determined to efface the memory of his beginnings as an apprentice in the trade of silver-engraving, and to become a ...”

“... were painted by Abraham Bosschaert, an Antwerp painter displaced to the Hague: landscapes by David Vinckboons from Mechelen and Antwerp; and architectural fictions by Paulus Vredeman de Vries, another refugee from Antwerp who eventually settled in Amsterdam by way of Danzig and Prague. It is persuasively suggested that the marked specialisation ...”

“... business. The most sensational book on this score was Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy (1971) by David Bergamini, who saw the Emperor as the mastermind of Japanese militarism. The book was so riddled with factual errors that it was easy to discredit. Even so, Bergamini was a much used source for Edward Behr’s popular book Hirohito: Behind the Myth ...”

“... an eye kept on Jim Callaghan when he was Foreign Secretary and therefore placed the reliable David Ennals as Number Two in the Foreign Office, so Mrs Thatcher wanted to keep her potential successor, Michael Heseltine, ‘under surveillance’. Readers of the London Review of Books, if they are interested, must really look for themselves at Ponting’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... my heart.’ Often, however, her formality couldn’t be improved upon – for example, to David Garnett: ‘I was grateful to you for your letter after Valentine’s death, for you were the sole person who said that for pain and loneliness there is no cure.’ It enabled her to deal with publishers, and, most difficult of all, to give away money ...”

“... consider the facts without venturing to interpret them. One of the first accounts of Buchenwald, David Rousset’s L’Univers Concentrationnaire, is rather weak on facts, but offers a welter of interpretations – glorifying the strength and discipline of organised Communism in the camp, yet making the connection with Kafka, Ubu and the ‘absurd’. This ...”

“... 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 ...”