“... expended on sustaining an image of Japan as a place of fanatical businessmen, of hara-kiri and sci-fi gadgetry. Books, articles and television programmes focus on whatever is most extreme and bizarre in Japanese life; the Japanese people may be viewed as amusing or alarming, expert or devious, but they must above all be seen to be non-human. While they remain ...”

“... Cockerell reports on politics for Panorama. Peter Hennessy burrows Whitehall for the Times, which David Walker also serves, as social policy correspondent. They have brought into the light much which, if not actually hidden, has never been articulated quite so fully. Politicians, civil servants and Fleet Street have always known these ‘secrets’. The ...”

“... grace without its looking like self-satisfaction. An answer is suggested, as it happens, in David Cook’s marvellous Missing Persons. We are quite unaware, as this humorously sordid saga of bread and marge, tinned beans, false teeth, betting shops, adverts, punks, child prostitutes and novelty key-rings progresses, full of implausible chance ...”

“... 1986, the centenary of Henri’s birth, Carcanet have brought out Alain-Fournier: A Brief Life by David Arkell, describing him as ‘the noted literary sleuth’. This, I think, does Arkell an injustice. As a sleuth, he hasn’t been able to solve the long-standing problems: what was the surname of the station-master’s daughter? What was Yvonne de ...”

“... misogynist central character, John, is as compromised and unappealing as the disgraced David Lurie. But perhaps Youth is being taken too seriously, and we are meant to mock this grim young man and the Conradian title that portentously frames his rite of passage. A good deal depends on whether we read Youth as fiction or autobiography. It was ...”

“... that in Germany Angela Merkel was nearly flattened herself for having allegedly espoused it. David Davis has promised not to swerve to the right, but as he is already standing on the right touchline, that does not mean much. According to David Cameron, one of the other candidates, Davis is a man of great ...”

“... Dibdin to compose patriotic songs about saucy, lovable and brave sailor lads. The essays in David Cannadine’s collection illustrate the many ways that Nelson-worship served the war effort. Kathleen Wilson observes that his wounded body became ‘the screen upon which all those who had fought . . . who had lost their limbs or senses or a loved one to ...”

“... of Dickensian horror: to Oliver Twist, fed on the scraps that the Sowerberrys’ dog refused; to David Copperfield, beaten by the fiendish Murdstones; to the little half-starved Marchioness, kept in a dungeon by Sally Brass; to the Nicklebys and Nell, driven out into the harsh world. Indeed, orphans are so plentiful in the works of Dickens that it is quite a ...”

“... and Sabotage. Indeed, reading through the other essays from fifty years of the magazine in David Wilson’s well edited and compellingly illustrated collection suggests that critics in general, with one or two spectacular exceptions, like Eisenstein on Chaplin and Agee on Sunset Boulevard, are rather less aware of what is going on than the auteurs. But ...”

“... But there are immediate difficulties with the book, difficulties of a kind once ascribed by David Lodge to a figure seen at academic conferences: the figure of the Deconstructionist who, radically sceptical about the existence of selfhood, identity and the subject, nonetheless continues to go for an early-morning jog. The jogging Deconstructionist – a ...”

“... As I write this, the Liberal MP David Alton is about to introduce a Bill changing the upper time limit on legal abortions from 28 weeks to 18. If he succeeds, more women will be forced to give birth against their will, and more will be obliged to give birth to children already known to be severely handicapped. Whether he succeeds will be determined by a House of Commons where 13 out of every 16 MPs belong to the sex that does not get pregnant and does not, traditionally, take on the main responsibility of childcare ...”

“... rather than La Realidad, misled by assurances that I would find the local leader, Comandante David; I was stranded where not much was happening for the third anniversary of the uprising. But was I the only one who was not ‘in Reality’? After all, the Zapatista movement likes to appear as something of a phantom, expressing itself in concealments and ...”

“... Saturday’s FA Cup Final has been billed as something of a connoisseur’s delight. The question being asked is not so much ‘Who will win?’ as ‘Who will blow it?’ Which of the two contestants will jettison a handsome half-time lead or snatch an ingenious own goal in the last minute? Which of them will come out of it more poignantly? Chelsea and Middlesbrough have this season been the soccer aesthete’s dream teams: bristling with Italo-Brazilian flair but inconsistent, full of attacking wizardry but suspect in defence ...”

“... From other male writers of the period there are victim parables and gender-bending allegories: David Garnett’s Lady into Fox (a wife goes feral, is tolerantly fed and clothed by the husband, and ultimately gets run to death by hounds); David Lindsay’s The Haunted Woman (the rejected male lover gives up and dies just ...”

“... skewed picture of the Crusades in Western scholarship.’ I’m not sure what he means by this. David Hume, in his History of Great Britain (1754-62), denounced the Crusades as ‘the most signal and durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation’. Gibbon considered them to be an expression of ‘savage fanaticism’. In a ...”