“... the one person Genghiz had feared and respected.) Kitbuga may have been inspired to try playing David at Goliath’s Spring: at any rate he attacked the Sultan (who inspired his own soldiers with the cry of ‘O Islam’) without the usual Mongol craft and precaution, and lost his army and his life. Had Hulagu been able to return he would certainly have ...”

“... can now be revealed in its true colours, as a rerun of the biblical story in which Goliath gives David a well-deserved beating. In both Gilbert and The Invisible Man Coren confronts the question of anti-semitism, and once again there is an instructive contrast. Chesterton and Belloc were notorious anti-semites, while Wells has only rarely been put in this ...”

“... wanted tends to get lost in a professional ‘linguistic ambiguity’, to borrow a phrase used by David Ottaway in the Washington Post. Crocker writes that he wished to prepare for peace. The effect of what he did was to guarantee war. Large parts of Angola were ravaged in the period following Crocker’s success in making peace. Here was a dominant ...”

“... archness when he speaks of ‘the great intellectual Western racialists such as Francis Bacon, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Jefferson and G.W.F. Hegel’, finds racialist ‘truths’ less easy to come by. After all, as he points out, when blacks begin to produce ‘literature’, they make a revolution by that very activity. The eruption into ...”

“... in the Renaissance, edited by Guy Lytle and Stephen Orgel. Taking their cue from Lytle and Orgel, F.W. Kent and Patricia Simons have turned the proceedings of a conference held in Melbourne in 1983 into a valuable volume of essays on patronage in Renaissance Italy. What is particularly interesting about both collections is the fact that they discuss two kinds ...”

“... motifs are intertwined with contemporary academic and sexual politics, clearly owes a good deal to David Lodge; the theme of the lost literary legacy invokes The Aspern Papers; James might be cited again in relation to the book’s punning deployment of ‘possession’ as a term of material, erotic and demonic significance, an association that also reminds ...”

“... of these productions, which I saw) was a kind of thunderous monotony, unconsciously reinforcing F.R. Leavis’s contention that Othello tends to substitute sonorous, self-advertising rhetoric for self-analysis. Robeson, of course, could not have benefited from Leavis’s interpretation: not only because it appeared too late, but because it presented – or ...”

“... was done even now. Oliver Tambo corresponded from London. Someone from England – maybe it was David Astor, he was a friend – sent him the Observer. And he had lots of American friends, especially Martin Luther King. It was a terrible thing for us when Martin was killed. Father had a whole collection of Martin’s speeches on tape and he used to play ...”

“... wonders why ordinary men and women generally obey their rulers. It was a problem that perplexed David Hume as well. ‘Nothing is more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye,’ Hume wrote in 1758, ‘than to see the easiness with which the many are governed by the few ... When we enquire by what means this wonder is brought ...”

“... ask when the clothing firm Benetton, by using a photograph on a poster of the dying Aids activist David Kirby, borrowed concern and pity for commercial ends. But the situation is complicated. In other contexts advertising techniques were taken up vigorously by Aids activists. Indeed, a poster was produced showing the same image with the message, ‘There’s ...”

“... and easy violence: taverns and clubs seething with wit and brilliance from the likes of Johnson, David Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Edmund Burke, courtly politicians, cheerful whores, fine lords and ladies, down-at-heel actresses, a time of ‘free-flowing claret and sexual anarchy’, as Roger Hutchinson puts it. Strutting and tumbling through it all ...”

“... stages of the conflict, that the sporting spirit was not enough. Lord Rosebery, presenting the FA Cup in 1897, might assert that football helped bring out those ‘splendid characteristics of the British race – stamina and indomitable pluck’ (I take the quotation from one of the first works to bring the history of sport in Britain into the realm of ...”

“... Is every fictional character a kind of doll? Thackeray presented his characters as puppets, which he took out of the box at the beginning of the novel, and shut away again at the end. E.M. Forster spoke of round and flat characters, as if they were two types of doll; the flat ones could be made lifelike by shaking them vigorously. The gulf between childhood toys and adult reading is bridged by fantasy tales such as Pinocchio, where the puppet comes to life, and Hoffmann’s ‘The Sand-Man’, in which the beautiful Olympia turns out to be a mechanical doll ...”

“... Dillon, and rushed back to Kennedy, who gave Dillon the job. Graham also recommended his friend David Bruce for Secretary of State, advice the President-elect didn’t take, choosing Dean Rusk instead. At Graham’s suggestion, Bruce became Ambassador in London, and before very long Graham was badgering Kennedy to sack Rusk and give the job to Bruce. Philip ...”

“... into a sense of false security by the nature of the notably anodyne Preface contributed by Dr David Edwards, the present Provost of Southwark, to the 1983-85 Crockford, the first to appear under the new dispensation. How it was that they failed to spot any danger signals when Dr Bennett’s manuscript came in remains, however, a mystery. For Dr ...”