“... the cannon and the firing-squad against the drawing-room and the kitchen stove. At the end of David Pownall’s book the protagonist and his confidant are shot. At the end of John Hearne’s the leading characters have been respectively drowned, decapitated and disembowelled, and the hero is about to be hanged. Ann Schlee’s story ends with her heroine ...”

“... already been printed elsewhere, but a number of them appear here for the first time. Professor David Dilks has provided, in his introduction to each volume, a lucid and dispassionate account of the main lines of development of British foreign policy, and a framework into which the individual essays can be fitted. Nearly all these detailed studies ...”

“... This is a gathering of David Lodge’s easy pieces: they are footnotes, shouldernotes and headnotes to the formal work in fiction and literary criticism he has published in the past twenty years. The book is in two parts. The first, ‘Personal and Descriptive’, includes a memoir of his first year in America, mostly a travel-year, 1964-65; his report on the turbulence at Berkeley in 1969; a trip to Poland in 1981; memories of a Catholic childhood; how he came to read Joyce; an introduction to his novel Small World; and his account of going to a Shakin’ Stevens concert in Birmingham ...”

“... phrase corresponding exactly to our ‘terra incognita’, a label unknown to Chinese cartography. David Selbourne was probably unaware of these fakes when he embarked on his translation of the text he now entitles The City of Light, but it is worth pointing them out, just to make clear that the notion that Italian manuscripts concerning medieval Asian travel ...”

“... As a colleague of David Simpson at the University of California and a friend graciously thanked in his acknowledgments, can I pretend to have the disinterestedness necessary to write an objective review of his book? Or, as a reviewer opening with a confession of this sort – what in the lingo of our day is called a ‘full disclosure’ – have I then somehow neutralised my personal stake in such a way that I can offer my opinion as unbiased? Can such reflexivity work to undo the debilitating effects of situatedness? These are the kinds of question that agonise Simpson, who has written Situatedness in the hope of stemming the tide of what he calls, following Andrew Sullivan, ‘azza’ declarations – ‘as a colleague of David Simpson’; ‘as a white, middle-class male’ – in the age of identity politics ...”

“... has already pledged £6.5m towards the purchase. A campaign to be headed, it’s hoped, by Sir David Attenborough and Scottish worthies is planned to drum up the missing millions. The publicity push, and a barrage of press handouts, are already inspiring such blandly favourable pieces as that of the Guardian arts correspondent and John Murray himself on ...”

“... yes!’ came the enthusiastic chorus. You might say that the Jerusalem Syndrome began with King David. Once he had escorted Israel’s sacred Ark of the Covenant into the city, having conquered its Jebusite inhabitants and proclaimed it his capital, he danced in his exaltation ‘before the Lord with all his might … girded with a linen ephod’ – the ...”

“... man who has been in the hospital for 19 years. Walter (the subject of an earlier novel by David Cook) has been emotionally damaged and mentally stunted by childhood sufferings. He speaks rarely and reluctantly, knowing that his voice sounds like ‘a fart in a bath of soapy water’. But he is a complete human being, fully capable of thought and ...”

“... has passed largely unregarded and unrebuked, treated instead as normal, natural and reasonable. David Kuchta’s revisionist history makes male clothing the centre of attention. Despite the dates of his study, Kuchta concentrates on the rise of Whig philosophy in England from the late 17th century onwards, and the development of a new, steady, English civic ...”

“... a bus station with its satellite café. When the bus station was demolished, the café failed. David Mills, the Owl Man of Albion Drive, fenced the site, built hutches for his birds and excavated a carp pool. For years, nobody cared. He had, like so many others in this borough, slipped into a crack between worlds. If the council acknowledged his existence ...”

“... say, the Spectator. The interview with Macpherson is followed by an article on immigration by David Coleman (the reader in demography at Oxford rather than the sports commentator). He is worried that ‘a long national tradition, developed over many centuries, could diminish for no better reason than its inability to control its own borders.’ It isn’t ...”

“... Defending New Labour in the Observer a few weeks ago, David Aaronovitch identified a sinister world of privilege, prejudice and plotting, where short-sighted, soi-disant left-wing opponents of the government gather ‘in shuttered dining-rooms in Holland Park, Highbury and Kennington’ to exchange vitriol, some of which leaks out into the public realm through such conduits as ‘the pages of the London Review of Books ...”

“... This book contains reflections on both history and theory, and is written with David Marquand’s usual elegance and intelligence. Its 19 essays concern themes familiar to readers of his biography of Ramsay MacDonald and his distinguished study, The Unprincipled Society: how can we devise for modern Britain an appropriate ‘social democratic’ theory of social action, and how can we construct a ‘progressive’ coalition which might give it adequate electoral support ...”

“... David Bohm and Basil Hiley worked together for twenty years and between them developed a very unusual approach to quantum theory. Bohm died in 1992, but by then the book was almost complete. It is a magnificent monument to one of this century’s finest and most attractive minds. Painfully shy, and finding few fellow physicists willing to give a hearing to his new ideas, Bohm struggled for four decades to get beyond the orthodox views that he had himself defended in his Quantum Theory of 1951, long the subject’s standard textbook, but which later put him in mind of Escher’s Waterfall, whose careful construction cannot hide the fact that the water must at some stage be flowing uphill ...”