“... best of the old seemed to me Desmond Vesey’s Confession of a Murderer, and of the new I liked David Le Vay, who is responsible for Weights and Measures, Flight without End, and Roth’s uncompleted ‘Trotsky-novel’ The Silent Prophet. The most disappointing is John Hoare, whose version of The Emperor’s Tomb contains awkwardnesses, and a few bad ...”

“... than a nibble round the edge, crop eradication has to be a full-scale military undertaking. When David Mellor, the Home Office minister responsible for drug control, visited South America last year, he made much of fighting the drug industry ‘at source’, promising British aid to the tune of £1.5 millon. Measured against the money generated by the ...”

“... the exact opposite of that of the libertarian New Right, which, basing itself on the writings of F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman, holds that most intervention by the state, and particularly any intervention designed to promote greater equality, represents an unacceptable infringement of personal liberty. In what is the best part of his book, Hattersley, with ...”

“... up in. I have no knowledge of Judaism, and my elementary feeling about religion is like that of David Hume; I am inclined to think that religions are worse the further they stray from polytheism. According to rabbinic law, which Lewis says gives the ‘authoritative’ answer, I am not a Jew, because of my mother, and, even if my mother had made me a ...”

“... of discussion, and there were intermittent episodes of excitement around a Watteau, Greuze or David. When an artist had something revelatory to say, when he found ways to represent previously latent perceptions and structures of feeling, an audience was ready to respond. But in the absence of such exceptional art, the business of painting and sculpture ...”

“... that ‘he would go to the stake for his opinions but would go courteously raising his hat’; David Garnett found him ‘rather rigid with good intentions’; others said that he never saw a joke and could not bear to lose at croquet. The generous impulses were certainly there, but tended to take predictable forms: faced with suffering, he reached for his ...”

“... as ‘a bohemian rebellion against established society which came to prominence about 1956’; David Ignatow’s poetic idiom as ‘Brooklynese speech’. But at least it doesn’t pretend to be more than it is – a ‘companion’, not a history. I wish I could say the same for the season’s lot of general surveys, which look so authoritative to the ...”

“... that obedience to natural law means ‘that every man shall pursue his own happiness’ (echo of David Hume and foretaste of Bentham himself?). The puzzle is rather, as Ross Harrison suggests in his discussion of Bentham’s thought as a whole – a considerable achievement – why Bentham did not enlist natural law as an ally of utility: they had much in ...”

“... the ‘principles and practice’ of the leading painter of the French Revolution, Jacques-Louis David, as he was of Repton and Brown. In discussions of painting Knight professed himself a colourist. He disliked the contemporary fashions for heroic subjects, statuesque figures, the rigidities of planar composition and line, while he praised painters like ...”

“... to dwell on the horrid actuality of crucifixion, or draw less than perfectly pneumatic flesh. David Jones was right when he spoke of the ‘toyishness’ of Gill’s sculpture, of ‘lack of weight and volume’ and of ‘a linear grace ... not always foiled enough so that too often elegance and sometimes a positive slickness harmed his work’. The ...”

“... Has Labour ever had a decent leader? Has not the conjunction of circumstance always ensured that the right man in the right place at the right time was, ineluctably, the wrong man? Or has there, perhaps, never been a ‘right’ man (or woman): is it in the nature of British working-class politics that those who come to the fore are always those who, as the saying goes, could scarcely organise a piss-up in a brewery? The Edwardian pioneers had no settled leader (the SDP has sound scriptural precedent here): Keir Hardie’s talents were other than those of a Parliamentary chairman; Arthur Henderson was dull; Ramsay MacDonald was both great orator and skilled tactician, though his critics within the Party were numerous well before the First World War broke out ...”

“... of him as a Sixties figure, who belongs to the youthful pantheon of the Beatles, Mary Quant and David Frost. He then embodied many of our hopes, and is perhaps as much the victim as the cause of their ...”

“... to SIS, or both. But The Climate of Treason is not one of these hagiograms. They really talked: David Footman, Nicholas Elliott, Sir Robert Mackenzie, George Carey-Foster, Sir Frederick Warner, agents and diplomats on the security side, and a large anonymous group of Intelligence men from both branches of the service, retired and active. The reason can be ...”

“... on in interviews with ‘His Excellency’ by Bob Astles. Long after the publication in 1974 of David Martin’s General Amin might have been expected to bring some constraint, Fleet Street went on with the joke – spiced as it was with prurient pleasure in a wickedness hard to credit, completely, in the security of somewhere far away across the world. The ...”

“... is Frank McGregor, whose unpublished thesis on the Rangers (Oxford, 1968) has been pillaged by David wholesale, yet who gave to him the most interesting part of his case. For McGregor, in several articles, has himself developed the argument that George Fox and others used the odium of Ranterism as a useful disciplinary control, and, in the case of early ...”