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“... to be from most of our rulers today. In 1950 when it was decided to go ahead with the H-bomb, David Lilienthal remarked: ‘Where this will lead us is difficult to see. We keep on saying, “We have no other course.” What we should be saying is, “We are not bright enough to see any other course.’ ” The interesting question is whether contemporary ...”

“... that he stood on top of the Vendôme Column in place of his uncle’s statue, he was struck, as David Baguley points out in Napoleon III and His Regime, not by the glory but by the loneliness. In Ham, he wrote a pamphlet on ‘L’Extinction du paupérisme’, explaining, in effect, how much better everything would be if he could just be allowed to get on ...”

“... from strength is magnanimous and noble and might be the surest and perhaps the only path to world peace.’ Nor was he a blinkered Cold Warrior. The Fulton speech was not entitled ‘The Iron Curtain’, but ‘The Sinews of Peace’: in it Churchill urged that Western strength be used as the basis for ...”

“... for the triumph of democracy. The third is 1919, the year of the Weimar constitution and the Paris Peace Conference, which ensured that the triumph would be squandered. What this means is that it was the dénouement of the First World War that changed everything: a messy, sprawling, disorderly event that spilled out across all attempts to contain it. Its ...”

“... Long War’ that lasted continuously from August 1914 until it was terminated by the Peace of Paris in 1990: the First World War, the Russian Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War were merely phases of ‘a single conflict fought over a single set of constitutional issues’, in which only the ...”

“... David Gower was this year’s most popular victim, the English underdog, the handsome knight sacrificed by knaves. But good news is at hand: the hero has announced a brilliant season full of runs. In the tradition of General MacArthur, David Gower has announced his return. I hope he succeeds ...”

“... what with one thing and another I’ve sometimes felt the same way, on behalf of Mark Frost and David Lynch, about the news environment that accompanied the broadcast of Twin Peaks: The Return. I say ‘on behalf of’ because I imagine that Lynch couldn’t care less. ‘It’s good to kind of go along with your life,’ he told Entertainment Weekly in May ...”

“... the Border hills near Beattock on the way to South Uist and Barra. At Oban I’ll rendezvous with David Paterson, a landscape photographer, who’s working with me on a book on the Highland Clearances. As I overtake a worn blue Audi estate, I look sideways and see Dave’s face and grizzled beard. We exchange incoherent signs, pull in a little later on the ...”

“... way of existence: it threatens our prosperity, our security, our ability to live as we choose, our peace of mind. But while all this is true, it’s not clear that it makes for a qualitative difference between terrorism and the other sorts of risks that we face. Threats of disruption to our way of life, even of the massive disruption that would be caused by a ...”

“... war had required a monster state to prosecute it. The monster was now threatening to devour the peace as well. The task at hand was to dismantle that state in the name of liberty. This was the basis of postwar neoliberalism, and the Mont Pelerin Society became its intellectual clearing house.On a conventional telling of the story, the real victory of ...”

“... is shared by an improbable international coalition of coup supporters, ranging from Tony Blair and David Brooks (who says Egyptians lack even ‘the most basic mental ingredients’ for democracy) to Bashar al-Assad of Syria, the Israeli security establishment and, above all, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which immediately offered $12 billion in ...”

“... bride of Henry V, is described as ‘the most visible, and perhaps the most popular trophy’ of a peace treaty. The story is told with fluency and a sense of momentum, but the events it covers are not entirely explicable – as Sumption sometimes seems to think they are – in terms of the brutal realities of power politics and baser human impulses. Ideas, if ...”

“... human rights industry. The offices of NGOs line the streets of Jaffna town. Professional gurus of peace and reconciliation have the resources to fund all manner of academic projects so long as they have the correct subject headings: ‘transitional justice’, ‘ethnic violence’, ‘even-handed peace-building’, ‘war ...”

“... undermine enthusiasm for any political or social virtues the Revolution might possess. The result, David Bindman writes in his excellent catalogue of the exhibition, was ‘to establish in British consciousness, in place of the myriad complexities of the real French Revolution, a series of simple pictures and stereotypes which have proved virtually ...”

“... the panorama of families in a land incessantly at war. Perhaps, they venture, this is the War and Peace of our own times. Well, it’s not. A modern work of that Tolstoyan sweep did arrive in our times, but it was written by a different Grossman: Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman’s immense masterpiece, finished back in 1959 and first published in 1980. A ...”