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“... man. Singer’s story comes alive when he talks about his own family. His maternal grandparents, David Ernst Oppenheim and Amalie née Pollak, were remarkable. David (1881-1943) came from a distinguished line of rabbis that included David Oppenheim (1664-1736), the Chief Rabbi of ...”

“... even further away? Eight years later, in the Deheisha refugee camp on the occupied West Bank, David Grossman experienced a faintly similar phenomenon. He was listening to an old Palestinian woman remembering her past, in the village of Ain Azrab, baking bread over a straw fire, the woman all the time unconsciously working her fingers through the motion of ...”

“... are commonly brought up to show that the modernist impetus survived in the generation after Pound: David Jones, Anglo-Welshman; Basil Bunting, Northumbrian Englishman; and Hugh MacDiarmid, Lowland Scot. The claim for Jones seems the weakest: it is advanced by Jones’s admirers, not by the poet himself, who took no interest in the question, having other fish ...”

“... book features a cartoon from the Independent: an apocalyptic lightning flash strikes and anoints David Cameron, while Brown and Alistair Darling flee London as Parliament quakes against the background of a setting sun. Andrew Rawnsley’s The End of the Party is less dramatic: we see Brown, Mandelson and Blair in a morning-after sprawl; Brown’s big toe ...”

“... This book contains reflections on both history and theory, and is written with David Marquand’s usual elegance and intelligence. Its 19 essays concern themes familiar to readers of his biography of Ramsay MacDonald and his distinguished study, The Unprincipled Society: how can we devise for modern Britain an appropriate ‘social democratic’ theory of social action, and how can we construct a ‘progressive’ coalition which might give it adequate electoral support ...”

“... given to looking forward to the time when the economy would be managed by monetary and fiscal means alone. It was recognised that there would have to be a period of transition between the end of hostilities and the emergence of a normal market economy, during which the elaborate wartime machinery of rationing and quantitative controls would have to be ...”

“... sentiment. The Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser – a guarded advocate – says, and means, that the most powerful argument for further development of GM agriculture is ‘the quality of life’ it promises for millions. Nor should the serious issue be perceived as one that pits a Ruskinesque ‘nostalgia for Homeric cheeses’ against a ...”

“... their admirers, especially those who become tourists of a foreign revolution while retaining the means to return home to safety. Some years ago, an admiring reviewer suggested that Cobb’s only weakness was his inability ‘to bring himself to sympathise with those who seek to exercise power, be their motives good or evil’. In the introduction to his next ...”

“... liberation conceals a genuine concern. Gray is driven by the need to be free of himself; that he means it is made clear only in those rare instances when he succeeds. At a Zendo in the Catskills: About the fifth day there, something happened that I’d only read of or experienced on LSD. I was sitting there meditating, and everything all of a sudden just ...”

“... in which to breathe. The high drama engendered in both pictures by the action of the form alone means that these are large-scale gatherings of nude figures which don’t require the sort of dramatic interest normally provided in such works by, say, ill-feeling between Diana and Actaeon or Diana and Callisto. In the absence of that sort of drama some ...”

“... it appeared instantly and has never lost its hold. To call something a ‘genocide’ similarly means to define it as an act of maximum destructiveness and culpability. Hence the sardonic appeal of a locution like ‘ethnic cleansing’, with its suggestion that nothing more than a routine housekeeping task is involved. Robert Bevan begins his book with an ...”

“... ideas of an author who, though no philosopher, was at least a consistent moralist. This is by no means a hasty or ill-considered Life, however. For the most part, Scott moves around the monument circumspectly, picking her way through the hints and half-sightings, as wary of friendly reports as of the sneerers, and assembles the ‘consistent fiction’ she ...”

“... Third Reich and later offenders of a quite different kind. Dehler’s successor called the law a means of ‘making a break with crimes directly or indirectly connected with circumstances prevailing in a chaotic period’, some of the most weaselly words in a book that quotes many. The obfuscation at work in both laws makes it hard to determine how many Nazi ...”

“... to ‘How does the standard image of wartime London match with memory and experience?’ This means that she has to consider the loss of confidence, by professional historians, in themselves, and she decides, in her introduction, that she cannot do better than quote David Lowenthal: ‘Even if future insights show up ...”

“... A young Englishman of means passing through Rome on the Grand Tour in the mid to late 1700s might well have been directed to the studio of Pompeo Batoni to have his portrait painted. It would probably only have taken a couple of sessions for Batoni to get the sitter’s face onto canvas – the 12 he gave David Garrick were unusual ...”