“... surrounding this issue in the States is strange and quite alarming. Although Republicans are by no means all opposed to abortion on demand, those who are regularly attack it as a ‘liberal’ or a ‘left-wing’ solution. And perceptions of this kind are what is really forcing Bush’s hand, quite apart from his own moral and religious convictions. Next year ...”

“... began to be recorded, though the more recent rulers have commanded more effective technical means. The tragedy is older and deeper than Mr Harbison conceives, and it is not to be reversed simply by going back on 19th-century romanticism. Even ‘depersonalised’ ends of state had no need to wait to be pioneered by ‘19th-century subjectivism’. There ...”

“... its failure to maintain the extraordinary industrial and scientific leadership it once attained. David Edgerton’s book, the more academic of the two, is a brilliant and often very aggressive challenge to a set of assumptions about the recent past. James Hamilton-Paterson, still one of England’s most skilled and alluring prose writers in or out of ...”

“... papillomavirus type 18 DNA in HeLa cells (using some nifty gel and a PCR machine). I think this means that Henrietta Lacks had genital warts. I think this means that she slept around. Click. A picture of Henrietta Lacks. A woman looks down at the camera: hands on hips, smiling, as if to say: ‘Is this the way you want ...”

“... unreliable ghosted memoir of her own and a reminiscence by the founder of her British fan club, David Nathan, and its secretary, Sylvia Hampton. Potential biographers might have been put off by the resistance of Simone’s daughter, who doesn’t want to talk about her mother, and many former friends and colleagues who refused to be interviewed or give ...”

“... be the thing on such occasions was given its head, and national sentiment ruled. The New Zealander David Kirk was first-rate: but the Scotsman too often talked through his kilt, and the Englishman proclaimed that he was absolutely sure that England would beat Australia in the final. At times it was like one of those ethnic jokes that people like to tell. There ...”

“... David Daniell is also the author of the only full-length critical study of Buchan’s work – The Interpreter’s House (1975). Both there and here, in the introduction to this collection of 12 of Buchan’s stories, he is concerned to defend the writer against the usual accusations of anti-semitism, racism and blatant imperialism; to protest against the way he is automatically ranked with Sapper, Dornford Yates and similar figures; and to assert that he is not only worth reading (which the general public has never forgotten), but also worth reading seriously ...”

“... some even burned alive, for same-sex relationships, while the loving sexual relationship between David and Jonathan in the Old Testament has caused generations of biblical translators to tie themselves in knots trying to conceal the obvious. Christ himself made barely any pronouncements condemning sexuality. This has not stood in the way of Church ...”

“... states of affairs currently preoccupying and bedevilling the unhappy place. However, after reading David Lamb’s The Africans these responses should be leavened with another one – despair. For this comprehensive and valuable survey of the status quo in sub-Saharan Africa is such a depressing catalogue of human iniquity that the reader experiences the same ...”

“... a year ago unknown in Britain and today unknown throughout the world. The other part, under David Owen, is being re-launched as the political wing of Sainsbury’s. At the Labour Conference there was little rejoicing over the demise of the Alliance: instead, the Party engaged in a self-critical assessment of its own part in bringing about a decade of ...”

“... have taken it all so personally, since it’s difficult to find peers for White anywhere. David Marr’s excellent and sympathetic biography confirmed White’s singularity and perhaps even his greatness, but the recent Letters, astutely edited and accompanied by acerbic and timely interpolations, reveals the Nobel laureate as a man lagging well ...”

“... when the axe fell on Charles Stuart’s neck, was no mere romantic gesture. Rather, it declared David Norbrook’s belief that to vindicate the cultural vitality and integrity of English republicanism at its moment of flowering – a moment of high energy not only in politics but also in political thought, journalism and in literature, too – is to make a ...”

“... heir apparent, Gordon Brown. These men are to Jenkins Thatcher’s political ‘sons’, with David Cameron trotting along behind as a ‘grandson’. (The book was completed before Cameron’s Conservatives abandoned any formal adherence to the Thatcherite slogan of reducing the role of central government.) In the process, Jenkins says, Thatcherism lost ...”

“... the poster boy for gang moronics, for self-destructive, incommensurate revenge? According to David Grossman, all Jewish children when they first hear the story learn to call him Samson the Hero. He is wrong about this, but then my Jewish childhood was not in Hebrew or in Israel. I recall the Samson story mainly as an early introduction to the power of ...”

“... individualist and a guilt-ridden crybaby.Before Crumb, no artist had so openly used comics as a means of personal expression. After Crumb, the deluge, starting with the underground cartoonists who followed in the wake of his Zap Comix (1968), a 24-page pamphlet that – according to one of his drawings – Crumb and his first wife, Dana Morgan, sold for a ...”