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“... a prophylactic distance. The SDP/Liberal Alliance is judged to have ‘foundered on the pique of David Steel and the pride of David Owen’: it is not clear why a note to this effect had to be appended to this other parody of Woddis’s, for the parody itself implies as much. Or as little, since there are those of us who ...”

“... the sciences which he rightly sensed to be the direction in which European culture was moving. The gentleman antiquary, like the amateur in every field, was being squeezed out. Sir John Soane’s house, with its jumble of objects, arranged in the antiquarian fashion to create atmosphere of a theatrical sort, rather than to impart systematic ...”

“... Just under forty years ago David Erdman provided for William Blake historical contexts in abundance in Blake: Prophet against Empire (1954). It was a remarkable work of literary detection, which still dominates the field. Some Blake readers have felt that his attribution of correspondence between text and contemporaneous events was over-literal (as well as hazardous), and Jon Mee is one of these ...”

“... of Richard Vinen’s superb history, the best accounts of National Service were fictional: David Lodge’s Ginger, You’re Barmy is a particularly successful evocation of the miseries and absurdities of the conscript’s life.* But Vinen, who was born in 1963, when the last national serviceman was demobbed, draws on memoirs, interviews and official ...”

“... of children. We need more funding!’ She ordered a member of her entourage to ‘talk to this gentleman’, then pushed on to give her speech. Helen Pearson makes no judgment as to whether splashing Margaret Thatcher with coffee helped Butler to get his funding. She does tell us that he spent his evenings writing begging letters to the worthies listed in ...”

“... the whole world more barbarous than that custom of these coasters in the west of England.’David Cressy, a historian of early modern Britain, wants to rescue these customs from such condescension. Coastal folk were not the immoral ‘wreckers’ of 18th-century myths, luring ships onto rocks with false lights; nor were they the proletarian heroes of ...”

“... whole seem to care, what is being kept from us. That is rather special; and a major factor, claims David Vincent in this path-breaking book, in our governance. It can have ludicrous effects. One was the refusal to acknowledge that we had any ‘secret services’: until recently, MI5 and MI6 had no official existence. Questions about them in Parliament were ...”

“... member, I have now read, in addition to the biography, the full-length critical studies by David Mikics and James Naremore, watched Jan Harlan’s excellent documentary, Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, and explored every entry in The Stanley Kubrick Archives edited by Alison Castle: a 13-pound art-historical tome containing solid articles on every ...”

“... whom this vast infrastructure has (at least ostensibly) been erected. It is a historiography, as David Ingleby wittily put it, ‘like the histories of colonial wars’: it tells ‘us more about the relations between the imperial powers than about the “third world” of the mental patients themselves’. For this reason, among many others, Elaine ...”

“... It would be interesting to place Jay McInerney and David Holbrook as neighbours at E.M. Forster’s imaginary table. Both novelists are fascinated by decadence – that much they have in common. But their diagnoses and anatomies of the decadent condition are quite different; worlds apart, to use Holbrook’s dominant image ...”

“... prints interviews with them, as if they were as respectable as the Shah of Iran. Dickson mentions David Bailey, who published a handsome photograph of the Twins, with an eloquent caption by Francis Wyndham, comparing them with Humphrey Bogart. It was the little public-school gang of Private Eye that broke through the hype: larger journals seemed awed by the ...”

“... the Company were greatly alarmed by the irregular and violent Behaviour of Mr B—. It teems this Gentleman had conceived a violent Affection and Attachment for a Lady, whom he had the Misfortune of meeting accidentally at the above Concert, during which Representation the company were frequently disturbed by him.   After the Concert was finished, he ...”

“... debt. Describe him more kindly as a ‘liberal Tory’ and pass on. Describe him, above all, as a gentleman. He applied his idealism to his own actions. He knew how to behave well to other people, to say gracefully what needed to be said in public, and to be charming and conciliatory in private. High-mindedness gave him both high moral standards and the ...”

“... Indeed, he complained about plans to publish some of the correspondence of his late friend David Hume, because it would encourage hacks and hucksters to ‘set about rummaging the cabinets of all those who had ever received a scrap of paper from him. Many things would be published not fit to see the light to the great mortification of all those who ...”

“... other than human life. There’s also a masterly volume of summary and analysis by the editor, David Fisher, who dislikes paragraphs and believes in calling a bastard a bastard. Inevitably, such an exhaustive work of reference answers questions nobody is ever likely to ask. As you leaf through the 6000 double-columned pages you are sometimes overwhelmed by ...”