“... for military staffs to prepare war plans, or for governments to hint at the use of military force. David Spring shows that Russian leaders knew they had good political, financial, military and social reasons to avoid war, and that their hesitant moves towards army mobilisation were intended only to underscore a firm diplomatic stand, and to deter. The French ...”

“... of habituation form a prominent feature of Johnson’s moral writings. And in the same connection David Rawlinson has invoked those ‘compunctious visitings of nature’ which, Lady Macbeth recognised, need to be forestalled when stern business is afoot. Though they lived in violent times, the Macbeths were not habituated to the killing of ...”

“... controls these proceedings with a Catoesque monomania and a forensically inflexible vocabulary. As David Edgar has pointed out, Dutt is the one person in the whole drama who takes exactly the same line at the beginning, the middle and the end. He is determined, not just that the Central Committee should bow to Big Brother but that they should love him ...”

“... with its stable marriages, television sets and cartons of milk. One thinks of Garrison Keillor, David Leavitt, and John Updike, whose most luminous descriptions are located in ‘the post-pill paradise’ of pleasure, estrangement and divorce. Thus the ‘normal’, whether a word, a category or a quality, loses its Larkinesque dullness and takes on an ...”

“... acquisitive and devotional.This isn’t a totally new style in academic speaking and writing; as David Lodge has famously shown, the performative style of showbiz and avant-garde theatre entered academic cultural life in the Eighties through the very conference circuit that Paglia claims to despise. Jane Gallop’s skirt made out of men’s ties, Terry ...”

“... of course highly topical. The publication of Aristocrats has more or less coincided with that of David Cannadine’s Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain, which follows some of the themes of his earlier book, Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. Tillyard’s modishly-titled contribution is an enormous account of four ...”

“... particularly at the top. And shortly before the cabinet reshuffle the then employment secretary, David Hunt, actually spoke to the unions for the first time since anyone could remember. What that portended, of course, we will never know, since Mr Hunt has been replaced by the narrowest ideologue in the government; but it is unlikely that Mr Portillo will ...”

“... In its own small sphere, the destruction by Express Newspapers of the Beaverbrook Library must rank as one of the worst acts of intellectual vandalism in recent years. No one who had the privilege of working there during its brief existence in the late Sixties and early Seventies will ever forget it. There, instantly accessible in their sliding metal racks, were the Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Beaverbrook and other papers; on a quiet day, when one was trusted, one could actually get out one’s own files ...”

“... Victorian fiction, from Queiros’s Os Maias and Flaubert’s L’Éducation Sentimentale to David Copperfield and Fontane’s Frau Jenny Treibel, does not do much more than show how many stories make use of a triangle between a man and a younger and an older woman. Few of his many readers and fans minded that Henry Esmond virtually marries his mother at ...”

“... the Museum of Rouen to inspire him when he was writing the story called ‘Un Coeur Simple’. David Hockney produced an etching to illustrate that story, and it is reproduced on the dust-cover of Julian Barnes’s novel. The narrator is interested – in an untidy, stream-of-consciousness way – in the significance of that parrot, appearing to the old ...”

“... to be put through antic paces. In such poems I am reminded of Hamburger’s friends, Edwin Muir, David Gascoyne, Vernon Watkins and Robert Francis, poets whose common styles share the knowledge of what words have gone through. What such knowledge proposes is patience, certainly not the petulance in which Hamburger indulges himself when the bad humour takes ...”

“... vituperation was sustained by, among others, a retired member of the Burmese Civil Service named David Alec Wilson, who sent forth a six-volume corrective to Froude which Kaplan rightly calls ‘a historical grotesquerie, a mass of undigested and unevaluated documentation whose main purpose was to prove that Carlyle was a saint and Froude a liar’. It took ...”

“... has to be overcome before the politics of balance can have another chance. As for participation, David Sheppard, in his recent Dimbleby Lecture, voiced very well the concern of men of good will at the non-participation of the young of the inner cities and the industrial wastelands in the life of comfortable Britain. The lecture has still to be given which ...”

“... Will not reign long as Amnesty’s new chief. Placed under stress he has been known to warp, As David Astor points out with some grief. I must say that Thorpe’s nerve gives cause to gawp. A decent silence should not be so brief. One does feel he might wear more sober togs And do things quietly in aid of dogs. Marcus Aurelius said there’s an age ...”

“... their defenders ought to lean over backwards to be simple, clear and explicit. Donald Davidson and David Pears have recently made pioneering attempts to render elements of Freud’s theory in terms comprehensible to analytical philosophers and empirical psychologists. Instead of following their lead, Wollheim retreats to the more comfortable procedure of ...”