“... and rode to the rescue of the working miners like knights to maidens in distress. One of these was David Hart, a former property magnate and bankrupt, who had recovered and lived in grand style, country-squiring, looking for a safe Tory seat and writing novels. Hart was deeply attached to Thatcher and to MacGregor, whom he had met before the strike. Pulling ...”

“... influence may have been transmitted via this route, it is worth considering the case of David Koresh and the Branch Davidian Seventh-Day Adventists. The siege at Waco had an uncannily Zoroastrian ending. Not only is fire, the eschatological cleanser, the sacred element of Zoroastrianism; and not only is Koresh, meaning Cyrus, the name of the ...”

“... even more important moles remained undiscovered. Sir Roger Hollis, the director-general of MI5, David Murphy, the CIA chief of Soviet Bloc Intelligence, and James Bennett, head of Canadian counter-espionage, were all denounced as likely Soviet agents by conspiracy theorists within their own services. In his recently published memoirs,* President Carter’s ...”

“... of the art in the sociology and history of psychiatry (one has only to read the later effusions of David Cooper to recognise that some very silly things are said about madness). But it also makes sense in that ample room remains for sceptical doubt about the existence of a set of culturally and historically-transcendent conditions of madness. One feels ...”

“... balance, as he did with Spooner in Pinter’s No Man’s Land. And even more so as Harry in David Storey’s Home, the latter an understated part of immense technical difficulty. Extremes are not edges and the edge is where he excels: the edge of comedy, the edge of respectability, the edge of despair. If he continues to amaze and delight, his powers ...”

“... available, well-used moulds. One of these turned up, somewhat oddly, in the New Statesman, where David Selbourne argued that what had been persistently overlooked was the fact that India wasn’t a country at all, but a sub-continent. This thesis has some truth in it, but there hangs about it an ancient and fish-like smell. It was, after all, a standard ...”

“... reveals, indeed, a remarkable level of social organisation. Recent work by, among others, David Levine has shown the likely economic developments that led to the lowering of the age of marriage and the relaxation of sexual morals in the 18th century. These changes are attributed to the rise of ‘proto-industry’ – in particular, to the ...”

“... Neostoicism is neither as difficult nor as remote a subject as it may sound, although to grasp its full importance we would need a keener sense than most of us have of the pressing relevance of Classical Antiquity to the thought and values of Renaissance Europe. The term is given by historians to the cult of Stoic ethics – especially of Senecan ethics – at the courts and universities of the late 16th and early 17th centuries ...”

“... found a way on which Hitler only later bestowed his approval. To this debate two British writers, David Irving and Gerald Fleming, have contributed thunderous points. Irving claims, what no respectable German author has claimed, that not only was Hitler not the author of the ‘final solution’: he did not even know about it until 1943. He thought the Jews ...”

“... up into clints, like the limestone Auden praised, the best remark about that coming, I think, from David Hockney. Auden sat to Hockney, who after tracing those innumerable lines remarked: ‘I kept thinking, if his face looks like this, what must his balls look like.’ At this rate, it can only be a matter of time before we are told that ...”

“... were insights in Wallace’s treatment of divergence which Darwin could turn to advantage. As David Kohn observed in a cogent dismissal of Brackman2, it is first necessary to distinguish between divergence as a purely taxonomic conception and divergence as an explanatory principle, integral to the dynamics of natural selection. Both Darwin and Wallace ...”

“... The creation of moral philosophy as we know it: in the beginning was A.J. Ayer, and moral assertions were without form, and void. More precisely, they were of a grammatically misleading form and lacking in meaning. In Language, Truth and Logic (published in 1936), Ayer maintained that what appears to be a moral assertion (e.g. ‘Stealing money is wrong’) ‘expresses no proposition which can be either true or false ...”

“... unlawful – did so ‘spontaneously’, says MacGregor, or orchestrated by MacGregor’s Svengali David Hart, as others say – the new legislation demoralised the union, complicated its affairs, made its leaders look shifty as they tried to evade the sequestrators. But the two main battles owed nothing to it. In the physical battle for control of pits, power ...”

“... John Weightman, reviewing Jean-Denis Bredin’s monumental work in the Observer, wrote of the Dreyfus Affair that ‘it was perhaps a good thing for France that the abscess burst when it did, because this brought tensions out into the open and revealed the “undeclared civil war” which would need to be resolved in the 20th century.’ It is, perhaps, a curious notion that there could be any time when it would be ‘a good thing’ for a country to experience a racking political scandal which, over a 12-year period, led to the unparalleled expression of group hatreds, brought about suicides, the ruination of careers and the fall of governments, and which produced anti-semitic riots without number in which Jews were robbed, vilified and killed ...”

“... of us adopted a proud and sterile form of internal exile, of being at least self-aware in what David Riesman calls ‘the lonely crowd’. While it may be true that there is some honour in refusing the false community on offer, if only for the sake of what Riesman calls the ‘other figures in the landscape – nature itself, the cosmos’, possibly even a ...”