“... accusation of academic complacency. ‘Lightning, Phoenix, Arizona’ has the abrupt menace of a David Lynch dream sequence, the cardiac arrest when a previously straightforward narrative crosses the line and touches a vertiginous post-mortem truth. We need to be reminded of the ugly, petrol-breathed, epidermic floss sulking past our own windows. These ...”

“... son by throwing a sharpening-steel at him in a fit of rage (the boy was the same age as his cousin David Herbert). Might it not have been male violence, as much as maternal discontent, that made Lawrence ‘abnormal’? Lawrence, like his father and uncle, was given to wild fits of rage. When confronted with nothing more threatening than a blank sheet of ...”

“... South Africa still holds a morbid fascination for outside observers, despite the competition from more old-fashioned Arab autocracies. An astonishingly smooth experiment in social engineering intrigues neo-conservatives. Left-leaning scepties hold their breath lest Mandela and the ANC allow themselves to be co-opted by the white establishment. A stream of earnest political tourists land at Jan Smuts to make the traditional tour from Cape Town to Durban, to arrange appointments with willing but isolated academic pundits and newspaper editors ...”

“... Patience Strong; ‘John’ Radclyffe Hall, but not Jan Morris; Julia Kristeva, but not Elizabeth David (nor Jane Grigson, nor even Mrs Beeton – writing about cooking does not rate high). Betty Friedan gets in, but not Mary Douglas; Hannah Arendt, but not Barbara Wootton. In general, journalists get a raw deal. There is no entry on Katharine ...”

“... relatively minor aunt sallies of whom not all readers will have heard, such as a certain Professor David Harlan. But behind these front men lurk the high-priestly figures, whom Elton hints will prove no less evanescent: Foucault, Barthes and M. Jacques Derrida, who is expected to share Sir Geoffrey’s company when honorary degrees are conferred in Cambridge ...”

“... which had two interdependent components. The first was monetarism. Lawson is not afraid to quote David Hume in asserting the fundamental relation between the quantity of money in circulation and the level of prices in the economy as a whole. He tells us that he was converted by the accelerating rate of price increases in the late Sixties and early Seventies ...”

“... of the local terror. The powerful role of the Politburo in the Great Purge is again made clear in David Hoffman’s chapter on Moscow. According to Hoffman, ‘the tone of party committee meetings at factories changed overnight’ after a secret letter had been received passing on the Politburo’s directive to root out all Trotskyists. In last autumn’s ...”

“... achievement oughtn’t to be exaggerated. It would be different if the creation of the Beatles or David Bowie – the only examples so far of pop genius – were the issue. Kit became a casualty of the Sixties even as he had been the improbable personification, what Tony Palmer calls ‘a parody case’, of that decade. He was beaten up – effectively ...”

“... with Pound as a sort of fever-chart of English Poundianism. He also includes a review of C. David Heymann’s book The Last Rower, a book Stead barely mentions, though it is relevant to a study of that political ‘extravagance’ we heard described as ‘a kind of saving grace’. Pound, near the end of his life, said he was sorry he had been ...”

“... is, in any case, another problem. Rawls has already been pinched by the Alliance – implicitly by David Owen in A Future that will Work, explicitly by the SDP’s Tawney Society. Talk like that, whether on social justice or on electoral reform, and you are already stamped as a defector. The neo-conservatives have made the most noise in recent years, just as ...”

“... perceptual and moral insight that it might appear. ‘Against Portraits’ and ‘A Self-Portrait: David’, both from later collections, make such insecurity their theme. The poet prefers here a face half-hesitant, face at a threshold. Still, his poems remain preserved, for reasons given in ‘Against Extremity’, from more threatening instabilities of the ...”

“... condition of minority groups. Between 1974 and 1976 three further volumes emerged from PEP, all by David Smith, though one volume, The Extent of Racial Discrimination, was written in collaboration with Neil McIntosh. The first volume was published in June 1974, six years after the passage of the second Race Relations Act. It looked at racial disadvantage among ...”

“... le Carré knew one another, but doesn’t see fit to add that le Carré – under his real name, David Cornwell – illustrated one or two of Knight’s post-war publications (e.g. Talking Birds, 1961): a not uninteresting detail in a story that includes spies and intrigues among its ingredients, just as le Carré’s do. Then, there’s an episode ...”

“... as critical principles.’ But the pressure of literary theory seems particularly regrettable in David Lodge’s essay on Milan Kundera. Much of it is an interesting, useful account of The Joke and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, but Lodge thinks it necessary to spend several pages working out his notion that ‘the modernist novel is generally ...”

“... guns is Ward Hill Lamon, who proves to be almost as formidable an adherent as Joab was to King David of Israel. There had been a plot to kill Lincoln at Baltimore: that is why the new President has ‘snuck in like some old chicken thief’ – to use the words of one of his enemies, the wretched Herold, a youth working in a chemist’s shop and hanging ...”