“... polemic directed against the popular Biblical exegist and inventor of a modern Hegelian religion, David Strauss, was written at Wagner’s request; the other three frequently cite Wagner’s works. They are ‘untimely’ in that they provide a powerful criticism of those seeking to derive a set of guidelines, political or moral, from the past or from a ...”

“... wet-dream – The Martian School, The Metaphor Men. Who are they? Christopher Reid, perhaps? David Sweetman? Norman MacCaig? Philip Larkin? Seamus Heaney, perhaps? Doesn’t Heaney’s description of a lobster –articulated twigs, a rainy stonethe colour of sunk munitions –vie with Raine’sscraping its clawslike someone crouchedto keep wicket at ...”

“... caused the British, sickened by such Jewish terrorism as Menachem Begin directed against the King David Hotel and alarmed by the danger of a revival of anti-semitism, to throw in their hand. The result was chaos. Professor Louis describes America displaying herself at her worst and in response Britain doing likewise; both showed scant regard for the ...”

“... say or do’. That tendency was heightened with the passing years of adversity until, as Lord David Cecil concluded, she betrayed an ‘inability to distinguish between reality and fancy’. Her immediate impressions of people were sometimes alarmingly acute, but her impressions of events were more often faulty and never more so than when she strenuously ...”

“... the principal intellectual progenitors of modern legitimations of capitalist property rights, David Hume and Adam Smith, and at least regrettable that he should ignore entirely the intellectual background to their thinking so powerfully reconstructed recently by Istvan Hont in Wealth and Virtue. We begin with Locke, and with Locke more or less in ...”

“... Rutherford was one of my early heroes, and Wilson’s biography of this great and lovable man has enlivened and enlarged, rather than debunked, my youthful image. Rutherford was the man who created the atomic age: a farmer’s boy from New Zealand whose brilliance and Herculean energy brought him the Presidency of the Royal Society, a peerage, and honours from all over the world ...”

“... Students’ Union at Cardiff (where his wife Glenys was a full-time NUS official) Kinnock, like David Steel, whose beginnings in the Student Representative Council at Edinburgh were very similar, is a standard-bearer of the Sixties generation of student politicians. But NUS politics, different entirely from the debating-society politics of the Oxbridge ...”

“... service. For a moment the conflict became real, past the coarse official confrontations. Yet when David Frost repeated one of his characteristic programme models, with a British studio audience and several Argentines present by satellite, no communication of any value occurred. There was jeering from some in the British audience, before arguments were fully ...”

“... away from the eyes of the international community. The ‘autonomy’ envisaged by the Camp David agreements is unlikely to extend beyond garbage collection. Ostensibly Two Minutes over Baghdad is a True Life Adventure Story in the ‘Entebbe’ tradition, in which an author trades his skills as a publicist against ‘inside’ information supplied by ...”

“... fellows living in college. Who more suitable than young Maud? The name had only to be mentioned to David Lindsay Keir and the job was done. Politics was to be his subject, it seems suddenly to have been decided. ‘But why politics?’ Why indeed? Anyhow, G.D.H. Cole put him on to the subject of local government; the Home University Library wanted a book on it ...”

“... The 19th-century novel was the great forum for writing about life – from sanitation to the condition of women, from politics to love. All the novels reviewed here are very much of the 20th century: whatever else they are concerned with, they are always about writing itself, that curious, aberrant occupation which the writer above all needs to explain to himself ...”

“... Jewish, too. This discovery brightens Tom up. He now knows he is Jewish. He will wear the Star of David, like that on his Uncle John’s war grave, he will learn Hebrew and support the state of Israel. Tom has, at last, got a general idea, a myth, into his pragmatic head – a tribal and political idea to warm up his bleak sense of duty. Tom is more ...”

“... the Russians will refuse him a visa. Two of the essays deal with Soviet relations with the West. David Holloway rightly attributes the troubles of détente to the two sides’ inability to agree on what it should mean and, in particular, to the Americans’ insistence that the Soviets ‘restrain their efforts to increase Soviet influence in the world’, a ...”

“... is cruelty in it.’ At Oxford he made friends with two other able autobiographers, David Thomson, the future BBC producer, and Denis Hills, the African explorer, destined to be rescued by James Callaghan from the clutches of Idi Amin. Michael Wharton spent much of his term-time practising West Riding Knife Throwing with his mates, or drinking ...”

“... proceedings. The Young Spartans is a history painting – it links him directly with Ingres and David – yet the bodies it shows are adolescent, as surely modern children as the rats who later became his models. It challenges the convention of the well-formed statuesque body as the vehicle for the characters of history. When he painted a carriage at the ...”