“... poem, patient in a way that Updike is not always, and calm enough to eschew Updikean statement. Douglas Dunn’s new book of poems has none of Updike’s virtues but extends several of his vices. It will be a great disappointment to those readers who have admired Dunn’s earlier verse (like the book of Elegies for his late wife). Alas, from somewhere, most ...”

“... above all to sell his book as topical, depicts her as presciently committed both to present-day Scotland’s distinctive Scottishness and to its religious diversity – two qualities which, he concludes, ‘Mary Queen of Scots, whose own spirit of tolerance and ecumenism was so far ahead of her times, would surely have approved.’ The history of these ...”

“... with a highly distinguished scientific background, a very sharp brain and clouds of pipe smoke’. Douglas Muggeridge goes off with Milne to the West Indies two pages after he has died ‘tragically’ of a brain tumour. Strange that a man whose clear and precise intelligence seems to sustain natural mandarin instincts should be content with such a ...”

“... the entente between IT&T, George Bush’s CIA and the Chilean military, which sprang that latter-day Demosthenes Augusto Pinochet Ugarte into office. As LaRouche rightly notes, Marcuse had done the state some service, and he knew it. In the circumstances it is hardly surprising that his extended career in US intelligence, including a sojourn during the early ...”

“... ministers ‘grappled with the tedious but mildly pressing problems of the Irish electorate’. Douglas Hurd may not yet be bored, but he would have difficulty in bettering the description of the problems he is facing. So few of them have changed, or have been solved. Part of the difficulty, indeed, is that the nature of the original solution was that it ...”

“... from Johnson’s Wire Works of Manchester. The firm was founded in 1791 and continues to this day as AstenJohnson, exporting papermaking machinery to 56 countries. Hewlett, born in 1874, felt quite at home with the paternalism which could flourish within a firm that remained in the hands of a single family, though he deplored ‘the harder and less human ...”

“... Everything on the Normandy beachhead will hang on your weather,’ said the D-Day planners, assuming that we meteorologists had total control of the elements. ‘Just name us five fine, calm days and we’ll go.’ A hundred years of weather records suggested there was no hope of their getting this. They limited their demand to ‘a quiet day with not more than moderate winds and seas and not too much cloud for the airmen, to be followed by three more quiet days ...”

“... filial man and a devoted husband. The account of that remote and not instantly attractive figure, Douglas Hogg, first Viscount Hailsham, Attorney-General and later Lord Chancellor in the Baldwin era, is impressive for what it tells us both about the parent, a model of old, Scottish-shaped Protestant rectitude, and about the son who without affectation loved ...”

“... It has been subtitled ‘An Israeli Caesar’, and the nearest contemporary parallel would be Douglas MacArthur, the audacious general whose political ambitions had to be curbed by the American President – Truman. The proximity of Israel’s military leadership to the political hinterland, and a well-informed and critical press, have ensured that few of ...”

“... were more in his line than the activities of the Land League. Like Yeats, Lady Gregory and Douglas Hyde, he brooded over the ‘spirit of the nation’ and thought it would be a fine thing to express it in a theatre, but he didn’t want to see it manifested in a rough form. Maud Gonne was too rough. Yeats had to hover about her interests, because he ...”

“... his part in the plot against Hitler. They were part of a circle of young people – Goronwy Rees, Douglas Jay, Isaiah Berlin and others – deeply involved in observation and anguished discussion of what was happening in Europe. Shiela Grant Duff became a journalist – foreign correspondent, virtually unpaid, of the Observer, whose arrangements seem to have ...”

“... to the peak of Matterhorn, but that climb was my last: all the way up I visualised Lord Francis Douglas coming down the way that he did in 1865 – straight – and it spoiled the trip for me. Soon after I read a book entitled Alpine Tragedy. Its most telling point was made in a series of photographs of the great Alpine peaks: etched down their crags were ...”

“... the anti-Communist purge and began a vigorous media campaign to end the blacklist. In 1960, Kirk Douglas revealed that Trumbo had written the screenplay for Spartacus; President Kennedy crossed the thinning picket lines of Catholic War Veterans to watch the film in a cinema in Washington DC. The blacklist, at least in principle, was broken. So Trumbo entered ...”

“... of Gödel, Escher, Bach is to explore such kinships of the imagination, while also exploiting Douglas Hofstadter’s own artistic imagination to the maximum possible extent, so as to make all the essential ideas underlying Gödel’s achievement accessible to readers without specialised mathematical knowledge. Previous popular introductions to the beauty ...”

“... his career. On the verge of office in 1964, he appeared to more than one observer as a latter-day Lloyd George, a radical tribune sprung from provincial nonconformity to drive the nation before him with wit and moral exhortation. After leaving office for the last time, he was more widely compared to Stanley Baldwin, a national conciliator and broker of ...”