“... movement, but seeming almost a normal aspect of the modern scene, like the ‘magic realism’ of David Hockney or Alex Colville. James Fenton’s ‘Dead Soldiers’, ‘A German Requiem’ and ‘Children in Exile’ are poems that work by a new and at first disconcerting technique, not to move us or to establish feeling, but to suggest a situation where ...”

“... Duro’s La Armada lnvencible (Madrid, 1885), a book that has been treated much more fully by David Howarth in his excellent The Voyage of the Armada (Collins, 1981). The most interesting part of this collection is the piece on Perez, one of Philip II’s secretaries of state, who arranged an assassination for the King and who came very near to judicial ...”

“... matrix through which East and South see themselves. A strong but representative book like David Dabyeen’s Coolie Odyssey* will go back to The Tempest, Blake and, most evidently, Homer in an effort to come to terms with colonialism. And Derek Walcott has for some years now read ‘Iliads and Odysseys’ (Chatwin’s phrase), Clampitt’s ‘middle of ...”

“... as for Who’s Who) in positions of power in publishing-houses; our true literary talents – David Jones, Basil Bunting, Charles Tomlinson and Geoffrey Hill – not forming a group, as they should, and in any case not read; and the food on British railways simply terrible (page 238: ‘Have you travelled on a British Railway? Gagged on its unthinkable ...”

“... genius of Dickens, could not have become himself in the poems without it. As with Dickens (David Copperfield, Pip, ‘George Silverman’s Explanation’) the detail in the writing has a strong diagnostic slant. Dickens’s heroes, like Lowell, are seeking to explain their present selves: but with the important difference that such explanation for ...”

“... the skin. Red Fog has all the modest desperation of the best American pulps, Jim Thompson, David Goodis. Depression literature. Orphan books written to be abandoned. Dream logic without the luxury of revision. Even the cover illustration is pastiche Gold Medal: it doesn’t illustrate anything in the book, but gloats over a top-heavy blonde. There are ...”

“... have gone so far as to theorise into a whole new mode of production, and which is celebrated in David Lindsay’s detective story, An Absence of Light, a product of American mass culture, in the following terms: The age of the personal computer had brought about a sea-change in the private investigation and intelligence business. Now anyone who could ...”

“... Rochester’s poems was made by Vivian de Sola Pinto for Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1953. In 1968 David Vieth produced an edition of 76 poems plus eight more listed as ‘Possibly by Rochester’; 75 of his attributions and usually his choices of copy-text were accepted by Keith Walker for his edition for Blackwell’s in 1984; to the 75 Walker added six new ...”

“... do I think ...’ Much of what critics like Louis Menand (in the New York Review of Books) and David Denby (in the New Yorker) have said about Eyes Wide Shut is true. The timing is terrible, the dialogue is wooden and Tom Cruise is worse than you can imagine any reasonably competent actor could be. He has only one gesture – a sketch of a wave of the ...”

“... at the time of the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948, when ‘700,000 Jews’, in the words of David Ben-Gurion, were ‘pitted against 27 million Arabs – one against forty’ and the US joined a UN arms embargo on the region despite the fact that the Arab armies had a clear advantage in terms of weaponry. Even the CIA and the US Secretary of State ...”

“... The most notable New York venues in that era were probably the Sanctuary and the Loft, home to DJ David Mancuso. Saturday Night For Ever includes some enthusiastic reminiscences of the gay scene in London: the drugs, the songs and the very late nights. The camp, glam impulses behind the upsurge in gay clubbing influenced the image of disco in the ...”

“... now if one who comes of the same stock has not a right to give his opinion in such like cases. David Hume liked this story, and in 1741 retold it in his marvellous essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, where he wrestled with the question of whether such delicacy of judgment was really possible. Some people doubted any such thing, but he did not. Writing in ...”

“... The archives in Portbou and neighbouring Figueres are full of oddities, carefully laid out in David Mauas’s documentary film Who Killed Walter Benjamin? (2005). They have opened the field for speculative interest about Benjamin’s death. In 2001 Stephen Schwartz, a Trotskyist-turned-Sufist who has always seen the hidden hand of the evil ...”

“... little purpose. There is not much sign that Labour has learned the lesson. The new Home Secretary, David Blunkett, is in some ways the worst possible choice. From what he has said so far it is evident that there will be the same dishonesty about crime, the same boneheaded attitude to drugs, the same belief that a Labour Party just re-elected with a majority of ...”

“... Kazuo Ishiguro, British in all but name, has not lived in Nagasaki since he was a toddler; David Mitchell left Hiroshima four years ago. There is a certain amount of unjustly neglected travel writing, such as the work of the late Alan Booth. But Japan has never attracted the attention of a Chatwin or a Naipaul, let alone fostered a Kipling, a Somerset ...”