“... the Report would create a stir for a week, and it would all then blow over. The expostulations of David Gore-Booth at the Scott Inquiry, in themselves characteristic of our robust Man in Saudi Arabia, merely voiced what others in the ‘policy-capable’ strata have been thinking, so revealing the untroubled conscience of our rulers. Some years ago, I found ...”

“... On team – led to an excellent correspondence. Mervyn Jones’s essay on Solzhenitsyn is absent. David Widgery, one of the best radical journalists of the post-war period, squeaks in with one of his less coruscating contributions. Most of the stuff is pure ‘filler’, principally made up of exhortation and, of that exhortation, principally composed of ...”

“... the Will and five days after his promised suicide: In a dispute concerning the character of David, Mr — argued that he must be a holy man, from the strains of piety that breathe through his whole works – I being of a contrary opinion, and knowing that a great genius can effect anything, endeavouring in the foregoing Poems to represent an ...”

“... on doing so. These fictions have the elliptical urgency of notes to an intimate; they can also, as David Garnett complained in a letter quoted by Barbera and McBrien, become ‘an impenetrable dossier of private day-dreams’. Some of the incidents and arguments of her novels are treated more cogently in poems. Some of them might have been better not treated ...”

“... form of a polemic against the idea of social democracy. The target is not the social democracy of David Owen and the SDP, an explicitly non-socialist politics of the left, but social democracy used in its proper historical sense to encompass all the non-revolutionary and non-Communist socialist parties of the industrial world, or what in the classical Marxist ...”

“... Formally, In Country has strong affinities with some recent Second World War novels, notably David Hughes’s The Pork Butcher. But it is also true to contemporary American life in the one sense that really matters, which is that of giving an unexpected and wholly persuasive meaning to that life. The party is over, and Bobbie Ann Mason, for one, has ...”

“... his fellow men. He was rudest of all about Labour politicians he thought feeble or inadequate. David Grenfell, the minister in charge of the coal industry, was ‘a second-rate, slow-witted sheepshead’. Thomas Kennedy, a veteran Labour MP, was ‘only a walking corpse, with a faint residue of mental trouble’. The Labour peer Lord Faringdon was ‘a ...”

“... The first three of these books combine to remind us of the role of economic development in our history, and force home the fact that there can be no true separation of economic history from other histories. The dates bounding the Checklands’ volume in the New History of Scotland might seem to be ones of political significance primarily, but 1832 and 1914 mark very nearly the span of the domination of heavy industry in Scotland, the special concentration of population and skill on the Clyde, and the social developments that came from the labour requirements of coal, iron and, eventually, shipbuilding ...”

“... Ambler acknowledges that his second Army film owed its success in large part to its star, David Niven, who used his fame and connections to smooth its passage past the censors. What does not emerge in Ambler’s characteristically modest account, however, is the film’s importance (despite its ‘meaningless and vaguely optimistic title’, The Way ...”

“... of the editor, even ‘boredom and emptiness were to be experienced to the full.’ By comparison, David Josephson’s more modest essay on Percy Grainger in Music and Civilisation comes as a refreshing surprise. Josephson is a victim of Lang’s musicological high-mindedness only to the extent that he distrusts any kind of ad hominem argument that could ...”

“... Now that the main ideas at large in the 18th century have been elaborately described, students of the period have been resorting to more oblique procedures. In 1968, in The Counterfeiters, Hugh Kenner turned 18th-century ideas into systems, and derived a comedy of entrapment from the spectacle of men coping somehow with systems designed to suit other people ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... all the way back to the beginnings of the alliance. In other words, there was a worm in the bud. David Reynolds has characterised the origins of the relationship in an illuminating phrase: ‘competitive co-operation’. Alas for the British, the competition was an unequal one, a fact that Churchill himself began to realise during the last two years of the ...”

“... as an ‘orphan’ and seldom publicly acknowledged her brother and sister. When her father, David Nemerov, was ‘exposed’ in a newspaper sex scandal, no one in the family referred to it. Despite her fascination with the life-histories of her subjects as stories, there is a kind of self-bolstering exploitativeness in her treatment of them as ...”