“... was born Guido di Pietro around 1395 in a hamlet in the Mugello, a region thirty kilometres north-east of Florence. By 1417 he was in Florence itself and already working as a dipintore, according to a document recording his admission to one of the city’s lay confraternities. Around 1420, he entered the Dominican Order, soon after taking the name ...”

“... under arms: virtually the entire military-age population of the South and a good proportion of the North as well. Very large armies – sometimes 100,000 to a side – fought scores of deadly pitched battles and hundreds of smaller ones in which casualty rates were routinely 20-25 per cent: 620,000 men died; cities were bombed and burned to the ...”

“... it derives somewhat from Yeats and from Eliot, and in this country friends of mine, Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom. And a rather strange position was built up. There were great arguments that poetry was a form of knowledge, at least as valid as scientific knowledge, and in certain ways more so, because it didn’t abstract from experience. We claimed any ...”

“... war itself often had little impact. When in July 1943, after the Allies had driven the Axis out of North Africa and crossed the Mediterranean, Channon said to Laura Corrigan, ‘Isn’t it wonderful about Sicily?’ she replied: ‘Sicily who?’One difference​ between the two diaries is particularly striking: Nicolson writes about people with almost ...”

“... Do trees have rights? Radical conservationists who oppose the logging of redwoods in the American North-West, or the destruction of the tropical rain forests, sometimes claim that they do. The forests, they say, have been here much longer than we have, and have as much right to exist as the rapacious human species that is destroying them ...”

“... subject, English perfidy. He accused English soldiers of unprecedented atrocities in Europe, North America and India. He denounced English spies for trying to assassinate his dear friend Maximilien Robespierre (two months later, in Thermidor, the politically nimble Barère voted to condemn Robespierre to death, but that is another story). He called ...”

“... 1971. Lebanese Christians massacred even more between 1975 and 1982. Syria killed Palestinians in north Lebanon in 1983, and the Shi‘ite Muslim Amal militia attacked them in Beirut in 1986. The worst Israeli massacre of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, at Deir Yassin, left 350 Palestinian civilians dead – ‘deliberately massacred in cold blood’, as the Red ...”

“... goods they had never been blessed with before. In the task of purifying the urban South, the North must have risked some infection from its impurities. He saw Hanoi too, and felt that the North was, though victorious, exhausted. He saw something both of the Vietnamese entering Cambodia against the Khmer Rouge, and the ...”

“... one of the few invented details in the closely researched local colour which Flaubert used for his North African setting, is both a named people among others, though not like the others historically attested, and through its unusual and unlocalised name, a vaguely universal type of humanoid untouchable, in something like the way in which the Yahoos both evoke ...”

“... that the partisans had selfish, sectional aims. There’s something in both views.Via Rasella, as John Foot has observed, is seen both as a ‘heroic act of war’ and ‘a pointless and vanguardist terrorist attack’. Bentivegna belonged to the Gruppi di Azione Patriottica, which was dominated by communists and socialists (he was a Trotskyite). Many thought ...”

“... are unquestionable, given that close to three thousand Russian citizens (mostly Chechens and other North Caucasian Muslims) have joined the caliphate. The downing of the plane in Sinai by an IS bomb was fresh in Russian minds. But other groups also posed a threat, and it made little sense to distinguish between jihadi groups and so-called moderates on the ...”

“... government, for implying in a previous issue that ‘the Provisional IRA began the killing in the North.’ Not so. It was the Royal Ulster Constabulary who did this, using armoured cars and Browning machine guns on unarmed and unsuspecting Catholic citizens in the Falls Road area in 1969. He [O’Brien] also states that the British army’s role in the ...”

“... bankruptcy of believing that ‘more’ is the same as ‘better’ have an even longer history. John Stuart Mill (among others) argued that humans are best served by a society in which ‘no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.’ More recently, the ...”

“... you can’t bring yourself to love it. It’s a position that has its advocates. A few years ago, John Mueller’s Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to al-Qaida urged a relaxed attitude: far more has been spent on nuclear weapons than can be justified by any sensible political strategy; they aren’t of much military use; their proliferation ...”

“... of friends’ bands whose gigs I used occasionally to go to in the basements and back rooms of North London pubs was an indie guitar group called Keane. One Friday night in the early summer of 2001 at the Monarch on Chalk Farm Road, my girlfriend gave their manager (an ex-boyfriend of hers) a couple of quid for a homemade CD. ‘That’ll be worth a lot of ...”