“... not money. Bevin’s Ministry of Labour was then the key economic department, not the Treasury. Peace changed all that. For the 1945 Government, as for all subsequent Labour Governments, the central, overriding, by the end almost all-encompassing issue was how to squeeze a quart out of a pint pot – how to marry the humane and generous aspirations of the ...”

“... uncounted’, ‘wine and corn and cattle,/Byre, barn and stall, sweat-sanctified smell of peace’. But the good place is in perpetual jeopardy, the ‘yellow harvests lie forlorn’ and the tractors rust there ‘like dank sea-monsters’, because the people flock readily to war, fighting blackens the fields, a traitor lets in the enemy during the ...”

“... spent their time doing very little of anything. As the Année littéraire put it in 1777, ‘the peace we have enjoyed for several years has allowed our warriors to cultivate other arts than those learned at the school of Mars.’ But soldiers did not write simply because they had the leisure to do so. In the 18th century the military constituted not a ...”

“... the normalisation of relations with the Franco regime after the Second World War (a ‘25 years of peace’ celebration in 1964 was attended by the then minister of trade, Edward Heath), the 18-year-old Christie volunteered to help the resistance, and found himself transporting plastic explosives under a baggy jumper from the Pyrenees to a rendezvous at an ...”

“... the script for High Sierra (1941). It’s the story of a veteran gangster, Roy Earle, who wants peace and a new life. But as he comes out of prison, the girl he likes dumps him and he’s on the hook for one more job. Huston saw him older, with greying hair and a kind of sadness. An edge of pathos touched Earle, and Bogart began to feel better about ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... This is a witty and useful piece of literary sociology, designed to bring lasting peace of mind to the scrupulous souls who grow anxious whenever the book-talk around them becomes too specific, and either say nothing or else say too much, only to feel bad later on at having faked first-hand acquaintance with authors or titles they know ...”

“... liberal internationalism’ have come from an older cadre of conservatives. John Mearsheimer and David Hendrickson are both outcasts from the American right, both teach political science in the Midwest and both have opposed every US military intervention since the end of the Cold War. They believe that the US ought to have emerged from it as a chastened ...”

“... David Mitchell​ is a career-long genre-bender. Only with his fourth book, Black Swan Green (2006), did he raid his own store of experience to write a first-novelish novel, a charming if low-key coming-of-age story, set in Worcestershire in 1982, full of references to Findus Crispy Pancakes, the Falklands War and playground slang ...”

“... about Netanyahu’s predecessors, they had their fascination, from the monastic self-discipline of David Ben-Gurion to the gluttony of Ariel Sharon. Netanyahu comes across as a hollow figure: a ‘marketing man’, in the words of Max Hastings, who met him while writing a biography of his brother Jonathan. Yet Netanyahu can hardly be avoided, or his survival ...”

“... David Ben-Gurion​ , the founder of the state of Israel, was brooding, explosive, often on the verge of collapse: every obstacle he faced was a ‘catastrophe’. He dabbled in mysticism, consulted fortune-tellers, claimed to see flying saucers, and lived according to his whims. At one point he went on an unannounced holiday from his duties as prime minister to take driving lessons on the French Riviera; on another occasion, he spent a week studying Buddhism in Burma, and tried to persuade his teachers that he’d stumbled on a contradiction in their doctrine no one else had unearthed ...”

“... up everything Grossman knew about the Great Patriotic War, and at the same time to rewrite War and Peace. Tolstoy’s novel was the only book Grossman read during the war, and he read it twice; War and Peace hangs over Grossman’s book as a template and a lodestar, and the measure of Grossman’s achievement is that a ...”

“... set the members at odds with the leadership of the Alliance and represented a direct rebuke of David Owen’s much more hawkish SDP. Labour was different. ‘The Labour Party will never die’ was one of Thatcher’s mantras. What Labour did mattered because it was the only alternative party of government. And in this case the party members were in tune ...”

“... David Craig has an unfashionable concern with truth-telling in fiction. In his earlier role as a literary critic, he wrote a book called The Real Foundations in which he showed how some of the most respected 19th and 20th-century novelists and poets had blatantly falsified social reality. If a work of realistic fiction is to be convincing in general, according to Craig, it ought to convince us in particulars ...”