“... Several essays in the valuable collection edited by Michael Lacey are illuminating on this point. David Hollinger shows how, in the early 20th century, scientists buttressed their claims to wider moral authority by making scientific inquiry into a spiritual quest, and George Marsden’s contribution reveals that conservative evangelicals became uniformly ...”

“... working in some less restrained modern poetic structures, such as those of MacDiarmid or Auden or David Jones, but not in Shakespearean sonnets: ‘unvermiculated’, ‘penetralian’, ‘exuriate’, ‘cineritious’, ‘intercrural’, ‘rupetral concentricity’, ‘cerebellic souterrain’. ‘The Price of Stone’ reeks of the oil-lamp. Murphy’s ...”

“... on the great issues of our time. In The Great War and Modern Memory he quotes with enthusiasm David Jones’s dodgy-sounding dictum that ‘the artist in man is the infantryman in man ... all men are aboriginally of this infantry, though not all serve with this infantry ... continued employment “away from the front” has made habitual and widespread a ...”

“... a radical departure from the way we have traditionally viewed our reciprocal relationships. David Marquand, in what is properly the opening essay of the book, argues that hitherto the Left has been possessed by the same ‘reductionist individualism’ as the Right. The result was a ‘paradox’: social democracy could exist only within communitarian ...”

“... of course, there were the young directors whom Wheldon fostered: John Schlesinger, Ken Russell, David Jones, Peter Newington, Humphrey Burton. They were encouraged, chivvied, and in Russell’s case restrained from some of his wilder excesses, all in the cause of demonstrating the nature of art by means of films which were themselves small instances of ...”

“... but as heroic underdogs. They were shown on television being shot and beaten by Israeli soldiers. David the good guy was now a Palestinian, and nasty Goliath an Israeli. The women and the old joined in to support the uprising, and all were soon aware that the use of stones rather than guns was their strongest political card in the vital game to win the ...”

“... II at the Restoration. There are, finally, three complementary essays on the political thought of David Hume. Nicholas Phillipson writes on Hume’s discussions of the legitimacy of the post-Revolutionary regime, while Istvan Hont and John Robertson show Hume dwelling, in apprehensive mood, on the themes of commerce and war. Hont demonstrates Hume’s ...”

“... Like the Jantzen girl advert, it was the ordinary person’s dream of utopia. More recently, David Hockney’s scenes, and Alex Colville’s wonderful flock of schoolgirls diving in to begin a race, give, as it were, the view of the painter. Tennessee Williams, a fanatical swimming pool man, wrote about diving in Sweet Bird of Youth, and contributed a ...”

“... ends by asking, ‘that it is possible and necessary to change society?’ In the concluding essay David Vital argues that although Israel has arrogated to itself the central position within world Jewry, and laid claim to an ‘overall leadership’, its wants and interests are in reality ‘sharply different’ from those of Jewish life outside, ‘and, in ...”

“... supremo, Magnus Linklater, as well as by the two members of the Observer’s investigative unit, David Leigh and Paul Lashmar. I added my voice to theirs, urging vigilance and caution. To no avail, however – and perhaps understandably. On Saturday, 11 January 1986, Donald Trelford, the editor of the Observer, had spent a lot of time closeted in the ...”

“... were either soured by authorial complaints against Olwyn Hughes, Ted Hughes and the Estate (e.g. David Holbrook, Edward Butscher) or have come to nothing (e.g. Lois Ames, Harriet Rosenstein). Most of the book-length literary criticism is unimpressive. There isn’t much to choose, for example, between Margaret Dickie Uroff (‘As they developed, Plath came ...”

“... her.’ After this excess the author was evidently surfeited. ‘Did literature do this to me?’ David Kapesh asks when he wakes to find himself in a gigantic breast. It did and it has done awesome things to Roth. Hungover, he yearns for the equivalent of decaffeinated coffee, literature purged of everything literary. Stylistic nakedness is one ...”

“... Scotland in which it flourished, by the English. It was subverted from within by a disloyal Scot, David Hume, the first of two chapters on whom is indeed called ‘Hume’s Anglicising Subversion’. Hume is conventionally regarded not only as the greatest of British philosophers but also as one of the most amiable and personally admirable, but ...”

“... the military? Of the poor Brits, we hear barely a squeak. It was the same when Major came to Camp David just before Christmas – he could as well have been travelling incognito. I think myself that Mrs Thatcher grew so sensitive to the cry of ‘Reagan’s poodle’ that she never failed to give tone and colour and visibility to the favours she undertook for ...”

“... Like other beliefs and forms of behaviour to be met with in this country in the course of the present century, much of the Thatcherite approach to social policy was imported from the United States. Joe Rogaly commented recently that if under Mrs Thatcher 10 Downing Street was attached ‘by threads of steel’ to right-wing think tanks such as the Centre for Policy Studies, the latter were attached ‘by underwater cable’ to their counterparts in New York and Washington ...”