“... Bob,’ mutters a member of the Band just before the music crashes sublimely in. It is a generally held truth among Dylan admirers that no one writes well about him, though the flow of articles and books is almost unceasing. The selective bibliography at the back of The Dylan Companion runs to almost twenty dense pages. Expositions of Dylan’s life and work ...”

“... to Arab provocations. The political climate was thus generally conducive to the use of force. David Ben-Gurion, a peppery and combative little fellow, personified this militant national mood. His instinct was to let the military have their head and to sidestep the slow-moving machinery of the United Nations. In Hebrew the UN is called Oom, and Ben-Gurion ...”

“... how Princeton actually got around to hiring Blackmur as professor of English, a position he held for twenty years, since in both style and background he was about as unacademic and un-Princeton as one could be. Like Blackmur, Wilson (the two were friends) was largely an autodidact, although unlike Blackmur he did have a good Classical education at the ...”

“... preferred. In post-war France, Raymond Aron saw Tocqueville as the great counter-weight to Marx. David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd reminded Americans that Tocqueville had feared they would become ‘other-directed’ conformists, incapable of the generosity, independence and energy that democratic government required. In England, Tocqueville’s work was ...”

“... a prototype Civil War Experience. Amazingly, Strong’s Diaries (which cover the period when he held two of the top jobs in British museums, first the directorship of the National Portrait Gallery, then of the V&A) never touch on any of these central issues. Strong’s view seems to be a very simple one. He has no time at all for what he once described as ...”

“... all the way back to the beginnings of the alliance. In other words, there was a worm in the bud. David Reynolds has characterised the origins of the relationship in an illuminating phrase: ‘competitive co-operation’. Alas for the British, the competition was an unequal one, a fact that Churchill himself began to realise during the last two years of the ...”

“... Israeli poet), Yehuda Amichai, Leah Goldberg, Moshe Dor, Shlomo Viner, Dahlia Ravikovitch and David Vogel; Oxford have published Amichai and Carcanet Pagis; Tony Rudolf and Howard Schwarz have recently edited an enormous volume of modern Jewish poetry, which includes a 300-page section on Hebrew poetry.* All these, of course, are in English only. But some ...”

“... and is, besides, the only diary of the war in Whitehall by a senior Labour politician. Dalton held two wartime posts. In 1940 Churchill appointed him Minister of Economic Warfare, in charge of prosecuting the blockade of Nazi Germany. Dalton relished the opportunity of ‘body-line bowling at the Hun’ but the expectation that economic warfare would ...”

“... on doing so. These fictions have the elliptical urgency of notes to an intimate; they can also, as David Garnett complained in a letter quoted by Barbera and McBrien, become ‘an impenetrable dossier of private day-dreams’. Some of the incidents and arguments of her novels are treated more cogently in poems. Some of them might have been better not treated ...”

“... story of the use of this power shows the capacity for technical inventiveness and adaptation which held good for a long time. In the later 19th century it was to lead to water pressure engines in the lead industry and to the water turbine, at a time when steam was becoming a more flexible source of power. High past investment and successful adaptation kept ...”

“... lecturer in the early Sixties. He was one of a generation of Auckland students which included David Lange and a number of his present Cabinet. A few years later Ihimaera’s fiction began to appear. He was the first Maori writer to give an account from the inside of tribal life and rituals. His novel Tangi was widely read and admired, and it was followed ...”

“... what Mr Hattersley thinks they ought to think), and in spite of a few ritual swipes at the SDP and David Owen, there is nothing in the book to preclude the idea of a Labour-Alliance coalition after the next election. But there is, in fact, one troublesome matter. Mr Hattersley denounces with passion and eloquence the appalling way that – despite the ...”

“... of discussion, and there were intermittent episodes of excitement around a Watteau, Greuze or David. When an artist had something revelatory to say, when he found ways to represent previously latent perceptions and structures of feeling, an audience was ready to respond. But in the absence of such exceptional art, the business of painting and sculpture ...”

“... that obedience to natural law means ‘that every man shall pursue his own happiness’ (echo of David Hume and foretaste of Bentham himself?). The puzzle is rather, as Ross Harrison suggests in his discussion of Bentham’s thought as a whole – a considerable achievement – why Bentham did not enlist natural law as an ally of utility: they had much in ...”

“... the ‘principles and practice’ of the leading painter of the French Revolution, Jacques-Louis David, as he was of Repton and Brown. In discussions of painting Knight professed himself a colourist. He disliked the contemporary fashions for heroic subjects, statuesque figures, the rigidities of planar composition and line, while he praised painters like ...”