Vanishing cycles in a pencil of hyperplane sections of a nonsingular quasiprojective variety (Q1356252)

The goal of this paper is to give an inductive way of obtaining the vanishing cycles which appear in the second Lefschetz theorem. By the way the author proves a result which generalizes the Van Kampen theorem. Proofs are only sketched and appeared in another paper of the author [Proc. Lond. Math. Soc., III. Ser. 72, No. 3, 515-544 (1996; Zbl 0851.14003)].