“... grisly slides of My Lai as the climax of his illustrated talk to the Cleveland Jaycees Club. John Updike has called Vietnam America’s least memorialised war. In its own way, this often ugly story is a handsome tribute to the Vietnam War of men like Thompson, Ridenhour and Peers, to the resurgent spirit of the Vietnamese, and indeed to its authors. On ...”

“... is too fierce. I find it hard to believe that Chaucer – whose wife clearly was the sister of John of Gaunt’s long-term and acknowledged mistress, later wife – was quite as obscurely middle-rank as he is presented. He certainly gave his son Thomas a flying start. And there could be an obvious reason for the omission of the Chaucer arms from the Ewelme ...”

“... Shakespeare, a socially ambitious young man, could have been loudly anti-Catholic, as in King John, without abandoning the family beliefs. He was ‘an exemplary Elizabethan venturer’ – not, as Thomson agrees, that this fact is of paramount importance, but it is well to know he wasn’t immune from ‘the infections of his age’. Thomson’s account ...”

“... to lodge a protest with the school, so sure was she that Joe was better at everything. The key to John Kennedy’s character lay essentially in acute maternal deprivation – and in the contrast between his cold, prudish mother and his overwhelming, earthy father. His mother could not bear to kiss or even touch her children (except to beat them), left them ...”

“... Even those determined to assimilate – like the successful businessman who buys one of the shoes John Lennon was wearing the day he was murdered, and religiously slips it on every evening – are torn between Vietnamese and American customs. The stories skilfully trace the dilemmas and pains of immigrant experience, and they also constitute a wide-ranging ...”

“... very well that politicians have long been borrowing from the speech of that (failed) politician, John of Gaunt in Richard II. With Warner’s constructions and strictures in mind, we can see in Gaunt’s speech worrying formulations of peculiarly English forms of paranoia. The English are meant to be leaders and warriors abroad, but they are supposed to live ...”

“... confused policy on the former Yugoslavia and its pseudo-populist sneering about ‘abroad’ (take John Major’s especially silly remark that he would not choose to spend a weekend in any of the countries he has visited over the past few years – even though he spends summer holidays in Portugal). An additional element of seediness came with the revelations ...”

“... of marginal notes on early English printed pages – Bibles, Edmund Spenser, Thomas Nashe, Sir John Harington and so on. She is more pedestrian than McGann, but more convincing. When the sound-stream of language can be represented graphically, symbolic gestures (swearing on the Book) and the use of the text itself as a visual symbol become ...”

“... motorways which currently criss-cross pastoral England. One would have to go back to the days of John Buchan to find an English fictional hero capable of squeezing so much fun out of driving a car. Should Cullen blow the gaff on Lord Moggerhanger’s exploits? And could the British social fabric survive their exposure? Life goes on has a plot which hinges on ...”

“... Mrs Thatcher’s two election victories have prompted a debate on the left at the bottom of which lurks the question: is socialism dead? There are several prongs to the case put forward by the ‘new revisionists’ who, in contrast to the Gaitskell-Croslandite revisionists of the past, are not right-wingers seeking to save the Labour Party from socialism but, for the most part, Marxists who have found it necessary to make a fundamental reappraisal of the socialist project ...”

“... standard pattern, he acquired a well-deserved fame as a moral philosopher and academic reformer. John Maynard Keynes’s jibe – ‘He never did anything but wonder whether Christianity was true and prove that it wasn’t and hope that it was’ – did scant justice to the seriousness of his purpose as he searched for the missing keystone in a universal ...”

“... enjoying his well-told story as an adventure yarn, a mystery. His narrator, John Baltasar, is an American journalist of Dutch descent. Travelling in Spain, during Franco’s regime, he got involved with terrorists, the Basque nationalist movement, and he feels guilty that he was too frightened to help them. Spain preys on his mind in ...”

“... of Artificial Intelligence, in which Hofstadter takes a line which tackles both the objections of John Searle to the very proposition of machine-based intelligence and the claims of Herbert Simon that such an intelligence is already emerging. But there are many other topics, which take him well beyond the terrain of the earlier books. Some of these seem to me ...”

“... was shortlisted for the prestigious Wattie Awards and now it has won another prize and Norman St John Stevas says it ‘breaks new ground’ and represents ‘an advance in ...”

“... has to have 41. The two old parties, even now, are but a whisker away. The new one is not. John Curtice thinks that the next Parliament could have about 305 Labour MPs, 151 Tories and 168 from the Alliance. ‘The capitalist vote,’ Brian Walden inferred on his Weekend World, ‘will be divided. Labour will form the next government.’ He was not ...”