“... to questions of this sort in the new study of the principal architect involved. Sir Gilbert Scott. David Cole looks at 19th-century architecture as if from the drawing-office of the architect: commissions appear (their source and significance is not questioned); the architect provides a design, supervises construction and moves on to the next job. The story is ...”

“... The story can fairly be summarised since its meaning and power are vested in the telling. It is David Plante’s manner that will attract or alienate readers. The Country exemplifies a mode of contemporary writing almost sufficiently distinct to constitute a genre. The defining characteristic of a novel of this kind is that it seems to consist substantially ...”

“... this hotchpotch of a party will expire before the next general election. Incidentally, how much David Owen must be regretting that the SDP is still alive. If he had remained in the Labour Party nothing could have prevented his becoming its leader. Perhaps the Executive Committee of the Labour Party could dispatch a telegram saying: ‘Come back, ...”

“... He wrote The Seven Journeys at this time (it wasn’t published until 1944) and made friends with David Archer, the publisher and bookseller whose Scott Street Arts Centre in Glasgow was a venue for the avant-garde of the interwar years. Graham met Dylan Thomas there, who was sufficiently impressed to include a Graham poem at the end of one of his own ...”

“... accounts of them regularly fill the review columns of the Sunday papers. But the idea of the self may be less simple than naive readers imagine; the writer of an autobiography may be not so much expressing a self as creating one in the process of writing his book, a point made in these two new studies of autobiography. It ...”

“... Ali’s latest book is The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power. David Bromwich Like the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada, the rockets from Gaza were a choice of tactics of a spectacular vengefulness. The spectacle was greater than the damage: no Israeli had been killed by a rocket before the IDF launched their ...”

“... undertakers hover in their closing pages), then at least from the crystal set to iPlayer. David Hendy’s book has the strengths of an insider’s account, packed with detail and anecdotes, shrewd in its assessment of personalities, light on socioeconomic change. Simon Potter’s is more academic and astringent. Potter tends to be critical where Hendy ...”

“... of life now reigns in the thinking stratum of Chinese society, especially among the young. David Rice’s Dragon’s Brood is a marvellously fresh and immediate evocation of this confusion at what one might call the first level of perception – that of the serious visit. Rice is innocent of any real knowledge of Chinese culture or Chinese history, and ...”

“... that Cambodia will follow a system of liberal democracy on the basis of pluralism.’ To read David Chandler’s painstakingly researched history of Cambodia and its turbulent politics since 1945, and to visit present-day Cambodia, is to understand the enormity of the task facing the United Nations as it attempts to bring peace to the country and to ...”

“... Æthelred’s premature death in 871, Alfred, his brother and heir, bribed the Danes to leave. It may have been the resulting pressure on the Mercians, as much as the temporary ending of West Saxon assistance, that led Burhred to flee to Rome in 874. Coins depicting his successor, Ceolwulf, and Alfred side by side (the so-called ‘Two ...”

“... been so sumptuously entertained by such a distinguished collection of bankrupts’. The bankers may have laughed, but Sampson thinks Lever meant it. If this is the case – and it may well be – it is a very serious state of affairs. Sampson, of course, wrote his book principally to do what he is so good at: putting ...”

“... Life: A User’s Manual is an exception, though it has clearly taxed the ingenuity of David Bellos. A chapter of humorous visiting-cards, for example, produces only one instantly cross-cultural item (‘Madeleine Proust: “Souvenirs” ’ – not one of Perec’s subtlest efforts). Luckily there are occasions when a bon mot in French can be ...”

“... this book, although it is central to Thomson’s development. The problem facing Thomson scholars may be that he left no clear account of the role religion played in his stylistic conversion, or at least no account as unequivocal as that of his near contemporary, George Gilbert Scott, the most prolific of the English Goths. Reading Pugin, Scott recounted in ...”

“... mid-century decades of the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny and the wars of Prussian expansion that David French picks up the story. It was evident to the more thoughtful that army and society were not well related to one another, and that the British army, which remained, to an alarming degree, a body apart, contrasted painfully with the efficient citizen ...”

“... lack of complexity is also the reason he lends himself to popularising accounts like this one. David Bather Woods writes in a deliberately non-intimidating style as he takes the reader through the various stages of Schopenhauer’s uneventful life. He was born in Danzig in 1788 and visited London as a teenager, where he made sure to drop in at the Bedlam ...”